Closing the Door on Malware While Improving IT Productivity
While Salud Family Health Centers in Colorado prioritized the security of sensitive patient data, the community health network struggled to protect servers, desktops and notebooks.
The security solution Salud had in place — while compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — consistently slowed down PC performance. Even worse: It failed to catch significant amounts of malware.
“Our help desk staff was spending 60 percent of their time removing malware and other nasty stuff that had gotten through,” says Salud CIO Randy Kuehntopp. “In about 20 percent of the cases, it was so bad they had to reformat the machine and rebuild it completely.”
With an average of four hours required to clean each infected machine, this poor performance cut significantly into productivity for Salud’s nine-person IT staff and 530 end users.
Meanwhile, Salud had virtualized its servers and was in the process of virtualizing its PC environment. But the security solution previously used on its physical machines did not have a virtual application, adding urgency to the search for new security options.
Seeking Expert Guidance
After doing some initial research, Kuehntopp and Russ Skov, a senior systems administrator for Salud, turned to CDW Healthcare account manager Alex Mattucci for help finding a non-obtrusive security solution for Salud’s virtualized and physical machines.
Mattucci recommended a cost-effective solution with a slim design and lightweight footprint on endpoint systems: Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business and Kaspersky Security for Virtualization.
Within 30 days, Skov was able to quickly and easily handle the deployment and get up to speed on best practices using Kaspersky’s comprehensive online training videos. In the meantime, Kaspersky took care of removing the existing security solutions from Salud’s system.
“That was a huge time-saver for us,” Skov says.
Speedy Deployment, Instant ROI
Almost as soon as the new solution went live, the benefits became obvious. Help desk calls plummeted to barely one per week — and usually involved the occasional end-user device on which the new solution had not yet been installed.
“The fact that this product picks up malware in addition to viruses is a very big advantage. Previously, all that malware was impacting our end users — they just didn’t realize it. It slowed their machines down but they just worked through it,” Kuehntopp says.
“Our productivity has gone way up because the PCs work fine. This solution catches everything. And the ROI is that we have an anti-virus solution that works without ‘killing’ the machines,” he adds.
