4-page Case Study - Posted 7/1/2007
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Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Enhances IT Management with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
Situation
One of Canada’s leading medical facilities, Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (Sunnybrook) has built a well-earned reputation for delivering exceptional patient care. The hospital is a leader in women's health and the care of veterans, and has defined strategic programs in cancer, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, perinatal and gynaecology, neurosciences, aging and population health, and trauma and critical care. These programs are leaders in their field and are helping Sunnybrook to achieve its vision of transforming healthcare in Canada and beyond.
Sunnybrook is an extremely busy hospital, caring for close to a million patients a year. Its 11,000 physicians, nursing and administration staff rely on a secure and efficient information technology (IT) infrastructure to help them deliver the high quality patient care for which the hospital is known.
The Canadian healthcare industry operates under rigorous privacy requirements, in particular the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act or PIPEDA. The legislation governs the collection, use or disclosure of personal information. In order to ensure full compliance with PIPEDA, Sunnybrook wanted to strengthen its IT auditing processes. In particular, it needed to put a process in place which would allow the hospital to track network activity and access logs. However, without an effective IT management solution in place, Sunnybrook was finding this a challenge, and found investigating and responding to suspicious network activity to be a time and resource intensive process.
Sunnybrook had been using a set of disparate software tools to manage network issues and security threats; these solutions required staff to manually inspect activity logs when issues were spotted.
“In the past, the IT team would receive network error notifications from three to four different system tools, which we were then forced to manually check. This was a time-consuming process. We needed a more centralized way of managing our IT infrastructure,” says Carnevale.
To address this challenge, Sunnybrook sought to strengthen its operational approach to IT. Specifically, it needed an easy-to-use monitoring environment that would help staff track servers, applications, and client devices in real-time, and provide the IT team with a comprehensive view of the health and security of the organization’s computing environment.
“It’s important for us to address suspicious network activity as it’s happening, or immediately after it has been identified. When it comes to protecting the network at Sunnybrook, timing is everything. We wanted to be more proactive with our IT management approach,” says Tony Carnevale, Technical Advisor, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
Solution
To meet its network management requirements, Sunnybrook teamed with Microsoft® Certified Gold Partner CMS Consulting Inc. to deploy a complete, end-to-end service management solution based on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. CMS also recommended that Sunnybrook implement Secure Vantage application technology, which, in the form of management packs, serve to extend the management capabilities of Operations Manager 2007 to operating systems, applications, and other critical components.
With the help of CMS, Sunnybrook was able to design, test and implement a pilot for 15 core infrastructure servers in only 10 days. Helping to move the deployment at a fast pace was the fact that the Operations Manager console has a similar look and feel to Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, which minimized the time needed to train Sunnybrook’s users on the solution.
System Center Operations Manager 2007 provides Sunnybrook an easy-to-use monitoring environment that tracks all of its servers, applications, and clients to provide a comprehensive view of the health of the organization’s IT environment. As Operations Manager 2007 has specific support for monitoring Windows Vista and other client applications it provides a true end-to-end monitoring solution.
With System Center Operations Manager 2007 Sunnybrook is able to simplify its PIPEDA compliance processes as the solution has the ability to securely and efficiently extract and collect security logs from the Windows® operating system and store them for later analysis and reporting. The extracted logs are then stored in a separate Audit Collection database. Audit Collection can then be used to produce various compliance reports, but can also be used for security analysis, such as intrusion detection and unauthorized access attempts.
The solution also helps hospital IT staff to better manage distributed applications—services made up of a number of separate components. Sunnybrook IT administrators can use the software to help graphically define the components that make up a service. Once a service model is defined, the service can be managed like a device. Events can be monitored, performance can be tracked, and overall system health can be reported on from the user’s desktop.
“System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps Sunnybrook to improve control over who manages the different parts of the system via a secure and scalable role-based architecture,” says Brian Bourne, CMS Consulting. “Sunnybrook can now automate routine, redundant management tasks and conduct intelligent reporting and monitoring – ultimately saving the IT team time while still providing a more secure IT environment.”
The solution also provides advanced clustering capabilities that offer additional availability in the event of hardware failure, helping to deliver consistent service to patients.
Benefits
Since implementing System Center Operations Manager 2007, Sunnybrook has been able to better comply with regulatory compliance requirements such as PIPEDA. The IT team also has access to a proactive, centralized management infrastructure for server and other network device monitoring. By leveraging auditing and reporting capabilities through efficient extraction and collection of logs from Windows-based operating systems, Sunnybrook has the visibility it needs to help ensure patient confidentiality and monitor internal controls. The Secure Vantage management packs also extend alerting and notifications functions of the solution, providing real-time visibility into potential IT risks. “Since deploying the new solution, we now no longer require multiple management tools to monitor our environment. System Center Operations Manager 2007 allows the IT team to focus less on IT maintenance and more on improving the level of patient care,” says Carnevale.
Improved compliance and auditing
By implementing Windows-based auditing and reporting capabilities, Sunnybrook now has the visibility it needs to strengthen patient confidentiality and better monitor internal controls. Role-based security capabilities in the technology also help the organization to ensure users only have access to the features for which they are authorized. “In today’s world, it’s important to have documented, followed processes for compliance auditing, including security and audit logs within Windows. The Audit Collection capabilities allow us to prevent unauthorized access attempts and improve our overall network activity analysis tremendously,” says Carnevale.
Centralized management
With System Center Operations Manager 2007, Sunnybrook can now automate routine, redundant tasks and conduct intelligent reporting and monitoring. This allows the IT team to operate more efficiently and take greater control of the computing environment. Sunnybrook’s IT team can also focus less on maintenance and help desk calls and more on new projects. Having a more centralized event management solution also helps Sunnybrook to further reduce operating costs. “With the centralized console, I’ll get a single notification informing us of system issues. This enables us to consolidate information in one spot which serves to boost our efficiency. The level of accountability has increased and the support calls to the help desk have decreased,” says Carnevale.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about CMS Consulting Inc. products and services, call 416-971-4267 or visit the Web site at: www.cms.ca
For more information about Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre products and services, call 416.480.6100 or visit the Web site at: http://www.sunnybrook.ca/
