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North Mersey HIS Securely Administers their Active Directory with ScriptLogic
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The North Mersey Health Informatics Service (HIS) has recently initiated a Continuous Service Improvement Programme (CSIP)) to enable staff and services to operate in a more efficient way and to deliver an improved service. As part of the CSIP the HIS has implemented a new IT solution, Active Administrator from ScriptLogic.
"The major benefit we have found is that Active Administrator is so easy to use, we now have the ability to quickly manage all facets of Active Directory" said Lisa McCartney, Acting Assistant Server Manager.
Established in October 2006, the HIS is an NHS shared service providing Information, Management and Technology services to eight NHS Trusts comprising:
- Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- The Cardiothoracic Centre Liverpool NHS Trust
- Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust
- Royal Liverpool Children’s NHS Trust
- The Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery NHS Trust
- Liverpool Primary Care Trust
- Sefton Primary Care Trust
- Mersey Care NHS Trust
As well as providing direct services to these Partner Organisations, the North Mersey HIS also provides services to wider stakeholders including Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust, Southport and Ormskirk Hospitals NHS Trust, Liverpool Deanery, Central Operations, Merseyside, Mersey Internal Audit Agency and the National Prescribing Centre.
The HIS aims to provide services that are based upon both clinical and business needs, and to respond to the complex and changing patterns of healthcare provision by being flexible in the way that services are delivered and resources deployed.
The Business Challenge:To Securely Administer an Active Directory
The organisation provides services to 39,000 employees in numerous locations. Lisa McCartney works in a team that is responsible for 11,000 of those users within a section of the HIS and she required a cohesive and flexible solution to manage a consolidated Active Directory environment, in order to ensure effective services across the NHS in the North Mersey area. With so many users scattered across a large geographical area at multiple sites, creating and managing a consolidated Active Directory environment for the North Mersey HIS was always going to be an extremely difficult challenge using standard tools.
It was becoming increasingly essential to ensure the implementation of a unified Active Directory infrastructure. The HIS needed to be able to specify what staff could and couldn’t do in terms of Active Directory Management and it was critical that IT staff could monitor and log changes to Active Directory. The Trust were keen to achieve consistent permissions and privilege levels to enforce role-based security delegations.
The Solution: Active Administrator – Robust Enterprise Class Management Software that reduces user disruption
BMS assisted the HIS to identify and implement the ideal solution to their problems. The HIS chose ScriptLogic Active Administrator which provided a set of tools which include: rapid recovery from deleted accounts, the ability to plan, edit backup and restore, and manage group policy settings whilst maintaining a GPO history. This capability provides a faster response to the corruption of changes which could have a negative impact on users.
The ability to centrally audit the Security event logs on the domain controllers was viewed as a key priority for Lisa and provided her with the ability to quickly resolve user issues. The sheer volume of user numbers previously made it difficult to track errors and deletions.
The Benefits
"We have now achieved a seamless roll out across our 39,000 user domain that has provided us with a greater level of security and which has created increased confidence in the network security and managed environment for all users" said Lisa.
"The ScriptLogic product had a positive impact straight away. We can trouble shoot and test our policy changes without actually impacting the live environment and without disruption to our partner organisations".
Lisa added "The GPO templates have made our administration easier and simpler and we have found the back-up and restore functionality combined with the auditing capability fantastic to use. If a user account or group is deleted for any reason the IT team can return it very quickly and effectively without any loss of access to network resources or downtime.
The time we can save on restoring is brilliant, i.e. a full restore can be achieved in a matter of minutes compared to 4-7 hours when restoring from tape. We have now achieved full control of our Active Directory environment with minimal disruption to our users".
She stated "As always we were pleased to work with BMS and we appreciated their assistance in helping us to find the right solution. We chose BMS because they fully understand our specific requirements and are expert in providing appropriate solutions to NHS organisations, they know what we need and when we might need it. We are confident in their knowledge and skills and have always found them to be prompt in their responses. We are delighted with the results".
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