Health Services Company Relies on Entuity

Case Studies

With $1.7 billion in annual revenues, a health services company, headquartered in Connecticut, is the largest provider of behavioral healthcare services in the U.S., serving more than 2,000 corporations, health plans, insurance companies, labor unions, and state, county and municipal governments. Their vision is to help individuals improve their well-being by offering members access to high quality, clinically appropriate, affordable health care, tailored to each individual’s needs, while managing costs responsibly.

Highlights

Focuses IT resources on business objectives
Improves network utilization
Prevents widespread virus attacks and potential service outages
Decreases MTTR by two-thirds
Improves development stress testing
Uses expansive reporting to improve forecast accuracy of network bandwidth and utilization
Prevents developing service problems
Communicates success effectively

Business Needs

For this health services company, IT Operations is pivotal. Whether it’s completing the challenging task of migrating offices to central platforms or consolidating redundant networks, IT Operations must maintain 24-hour, seven-day-a-week customer access to resources and information. As the Senior Vice-President of IT Operations explains: “Our goal is to manage the network to support our business. To ensure 100% access to our business systems, we need to know what equipment we have, what is not being used and how to identify potential problem areas to effectively manage traffic and bandwidth.”

During the first attempt at consolidation, a migrated office began consuming huge amounts of bandwidth, creating performance issues. Rudimentary network tools provided little to no reporting capabilities, making it impossible for IT Operations to determine the source of the problem. “We realized that to continue migration, we needed more from a network management solution. We needed network fault detection, network performance monitoring, network inventory discovery & management and in-depth reporting capabilities in one solution,” he states.

The company faced several challenges in meeting its goal:

Network consolidation; elimination of redundancies, taking advantage of equipment trade-ins and lower costs
Consistent, reliable reporting to support and manage for 100% access
Inventory management to determine resource capacity and effectively use bandwidth
Stress testing of applications, and tracking and reporting on results
Maintenance of high level of service for all customers

As the network engineer at the company explains:

“With Entuity, we have fault, performance and inventory management all in one tool. This makes our work more effective. Rather than integrating and working with two or three tools, we easily learned and use one. Our team is now more responsive to customer requests.”

Key to helping VP and his team choose Entuity’s solution is that Entuity consolidates and correlates three operational disciplines using a centralized repository, a powerful analytics engine, presentation and notification and unprecedented reporting.

“With Entuity, we have fault, performance and inventory management all in one tool. This makes our work more effective. Rather than integrating and working with two or three tools, we easily learned and use one. Our team is now more responsive to customer requests.”

The Results

Securing the Entuity resource management reports, the company recently identified a rampant computer virus, preventing widespread infection within the company.

“Entuity’s ability to track MAC and IP addresses on switches and routers proved to be an extremely useful feature,” according to the head network engineer. Their network sensors detected the virus scans and identified the infected IP address. “We entered the IP address into Entuity and with the touch of a button, determined which PCs and ports were infected and where they were located. Entuity allowed us to rapidly shut down the infected ports and switches. To move so quickly was invaluable. We experienced little impact to our network and services.”

The results of using Entuity include:

Improved Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): With Entuity implemented, the IT Operations team estimates it has decreased MTTR of problems involving PCs, servers and switches by two-thirds, freeing up valuable resources and increasing productivity.

Enhanced Support of Development: IT Operations more effectively supports their development teams. Utilizing Entuity, the team helps stress test applications before they are released into production. The network engineers drill down and determine what ports development servers use. Once this is determined, engineers track server and port utilization (volume of activity) during stress tests to determine where bottlenecks or bandwidth problems might occur. With Entuity, IT Operations identifies faults in the network and proactively increases bandwidth, preventing problems in production.

Impact Analysis: According to the senior VP, “Entuity enables us to review the impact consolidation has on our WAN in real time. We proactively evaluate where we are and use this analysis to forecast future needs as our consolidation efforts continue. We plan to display performance reports on our Intranet so business units can review system availability at any time and management can determine how well IT operations is performing. With greater visibility for the entire organization, we effectively prevent service outages and communicate our effectiveness.”

Summary of Results Achieved with Entuity

Focused IT resources on business objectives
Improved network utilization
Prevented widespread virus attack and potential service outage
Decreased MTTR by two-thirds
Improved development stress testing
Used expansive reporting to improve forecast accuracy of network bandwidth and utilization
Prevented developing service problems
Communicated success effectively

“Entuity’s willingness to be a true partner provided us with the ability to impact product planning, further helping us to meet our goals and objectives for better network operations and availability.”
– Senior VP of IT Operations

About Entuity
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unied enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston.