Reducing Windows Logon Times by 78% and Driving VDI Programme Success

El Camino Hospital is a nonprofit healthcare organisation with hospital campuses in Mountain View and Los Gatos, California. Their IT team supports over 3,200 employees, including 1,500 physicians, who work between two campuses, offsite clinical offices or remotely.  

The organisation’s hospitals have served communities in the southern San Francisco Bay area for over 50 years. El Camino provides superior care by focusing on patients’ needs rather than shareholders’ demands – incorporating the latest, proven medical technology and attracting the best medical staff and affiliated physicians.

Challenges

James Brummett, Technical Director and Greg Lubben, Desktop Engineer, were implementing a VDI project with VMware Horizon View 5.2. The primary objective of their project was to provide a consistent and reliable desktop experience where users can access everything they need, anywhere they are and from any device.  

“First and foremost, it was about significantly rethinking and improving the care-provider experience,” said Brummett. “Centralising our desktop delivery also allowed us to securely manage company data from within the data centre and ensure adherence to standards.” Delivering secure and managed desktops in the hospital environment has unique challenges.  

 El Camino’s staff use machines interchangeably. With people travelling between campuses, multiple logins are required within a single clinical workflow. During their VDI implementation, Brummett and Lubben found that Windows logon times were excessively long, creating frustration and reducing productivity. 

“We knew that long logon times are unacceptable in a hospital setting,” said Brummett. “In our VDI sandbox, we found that initial Windows logons were taking as a long as one minute and thirty seconds, which would derail the success of our VDI project.” 

With clinicians travelling in and out of the hospital daily, it was critical to manage application variables based on location. Controlling printing is a particular challenge in the healthcare environment. For example, as nurses travel throughout floors, their printer settings must adjust with them – ensuring documents are printed at the nearest printer rather than the last printer used. When mistakes are made, confidential patient information can be printed somewhere else in the organisation.

Solution

Ivanti Environment Manager was recommended by Kovarus, a leading systems integrator assisting in the VDI project, to complement El Camino’s deployment of VMware Horizon View. By applying policy at the point of application execution, rather than at startup, Environment Manager reduced El Camino’s Windows logon times from one minute and thirty seconds to twenty seconds on average – an improvement of 78%. 

Ivanti Environment Manager allows El Camino to centralise the security and delivery of desktops while maintaining the personalization of each user. “With Environment Manager, staff get that ‘new computer smell’ every morning,” said Brummett. “We can ensure applications are secure and up-to-date on the backend, but the user experience and icons stay exactly the same. Even after we’ve performed a global update, when a user logs in, any personalization they’ve done to their desktop is just as they left it.” 

In addition to benefiting end users, El Camino saw significant IT savings. “From an admin perspective, Environment Manager has dramatically reduced the complexity of our virtualization project,” said Lubben. 

“El Camino has reduced the number of images and pools we maintain, and the need for custom scripting to support policy configuration has declined 75 percent.” In particular, he reports tremendous ease of use in setting up and configuring policies. 

“Ivanti Environment Manager really drove the success of our VDI programme,” said Lubben. “We didn’t encounter a problem it couldn’t handle.”

_{Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.}