The Challenge

As a large, national health care service provider with more than 8 million members and an annual IT budget of more than $1 billion, Kaiser manages a vast network of different systems. Kaiser faces the additional challenge of managing more than 300,000 medical devices (and counting) entering the network. Kaiser needed help from BDNA on a variety of initiatives:

• Retire Windows NT. A large installed base of Windows NT represents an ongoing security and support challenge in this distributed environment. Kaiser needed to remove NT, but first it had to locate the NT systems.
• Count biomedical devices. In the ever-advancing world of medical technology, more and more non-mainstream IT devices are being attached to the network. Like all technologies, these devices present security challenges. Many of these instruments have traditionally fallen outside of the IT management umbrella, remaining invisible to IT yet posing a risk nonetheless.

The Solution

BDNA Insight collects configuration information about all network resources-hardware and software-in a secure and non-invasive manner.

• BDNA Insight collects configuration information about all network resources-hardware and software-in a secure and non-invasive manner.
• BDNA Analyze leverages the asset inventory data collected by BDNA Insight into decision power for IT managers. Hard numbers on which technology assets are used by which sites, departments and divisions help commanders add, subtract or redeploy resources as needed.

The Results

The BDNA technology investment delivered significant return for Kaiser.

•  NT remediation baseline established. Kaiser ran BDNA Insight during off-hours over a five-day period, using three parallel BDNA servers. BDNA provided detailed identification and location information on all Windows NT systems on the network, which established a baseline for the remediation effort and provided for continual monitoring to track the progress of the overall project.
• Complete biomedical device inventory. Kaiser and BDNA worked together to leverage BDNA's universal fingerprinting capability to identify, locate and inventory all networked medical technologies that had never been managed by IT. Kaiser was able to quickly identify devices with operating system risks and then provide this information to the system vendors for immediate remediation.