When international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer decided to implement a new collaborative document-management system, the firm found it would also need to convert from Windows 2000 to Windows XP operating system–a time-consuming and daunting task, considering the company had more than 4,000 PCs throughout its 27 offices around the world.

Richard Harris, IT manager for the firm’s U.S. offices, decided the time was right to look into desktop management tools, as well. Harris began seeking a solution that could reduce the time, network bandwidth and manual reconfiguration required to roll out the new operating systems and application, as well as manage and simplify future changes to the network.

With the increasing complexity of today’s enterprise IT environments, software distribution, new PC rollouts, hardware and software asset management, and keeping up with the continual flurry of security patches and updates across enterprise networks is a complex process. For businesses with confidential data in their systems, ensuring a secure environment is also of paramount importance.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer provides legal services to a broad range of national and multinational corporations, financial institutions and governments. The firm’s practice areas include antitrust, mergers and acquisitions, dispute resolution, employment, finance, real estate and tax law, which means information must be diligently and uniformly protected across the entire network–even as the network grows and employees become more mobile.

Harris says an overarching goal for the firm was to centralize the management of PCs, servers and mobile devices in order to increase IT efficiency across its many offices. “We were initially looking for a solution that could automate and simplify our operating system migration of literally thousands of desktops and laptops worldwide,” Harris explains. The search for a solution also focused on finding a management system that would enable IT staff to work more efficiently and productively–instead of increasing staff hours.

“Since we also had compliance and security concerns, we found that we had a short list of possible products. We ultimately chose matrix42’s Empirum PRO because of the clear, single-management view and the intelligent build process that it offers.”

Using Empirum PRO’s build function, the hard-disk imaging of PCs–a time-consuming activity that is part of OS installations and software rollouts–is eliminated. “We wanted to get away from hard-disk imaging due to its heavy administration burden. For this reason, the unique dynamic-build approach was a highly attractive feature for us,” Harris says. The program detects the device, selects the necessary drivers and then performs a complete unattended installation, including user-specific configurations.

Such capabilities have enabled the law firm to reduce workload on the IT staff. Each office has a local IT support team, and the main Empirum PRO server resides at the firm’s London location. Administrators, regardless of their location, can connect remotely to the central server to access and utilize the management tools. Following a pilot implementation phase, the system is now being used to manage more than 4,000 computers across the law firm’s offices worldwide.

Ending disruptive downloads

Automated software distribution minimizes the costs related to client and server administration. Integrated patch management also ensures that organizations are protected against the latest threats.

Automation is becoming increasingly useful when dealing with the growing number of security updates from vendors. For example, consider “Patch Tuesday,” the second Tuesday of each month during which Microsoft releases its newest fixes for its Windows operating systems. With the Empirum PRO technology in place, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is now able to roll out new software, updates and patches from a centralized location and install them on desktops and servers automatically. Installations are fast, and end-users are not required to log off at any time during the process.

“Another issue we wanted to eliminate was disruptive downloads, where people were having to sit and wait while their computers completed the updates,” Harris explains. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer now auto-schedules many of its regular software updates to take place unattended in the early mornings during non-business hours. “Our administrators have configured the system to deliver updates overnight, so they are completely unobtrusive for the vast majority of our systems now,” he says.

Inventory control

The ability to obtain an accurate and detailed overview of enterprise assets can be crucial for making business decisions, such as when to upgrade or add equipment, or accurately budgeting IT projects. It is also necessary to ensure that assets such as laptops and hand-held devices are not misplaced. Asset management, however, is often a cumbersome task for many organizations, with the IT staff workload growing with the size of the organization and number of dispersed locations and users.

Using Empirum PRO, IT staff at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer are now able to generate an enterprise-wide inventory of IT assets within a short time–often in just minutes. They can also perform automated software license management and application usage tracking. These capabilities enable the firm to ensure compliance and standardization across its 27 locations worldwide.

“Previously, we had ad hoc inventory systems in each office that weren’t connected,” Harris says. “We now have a comprehensive view of all our IT assets. This is also delivering a tangible cost savings, since we can now see immediately where a location has purchased a batch of licenses that is being underutilized, so that we can distribute the surplus around the network more efficiently.”

The detailed inventorying capabilities can also be used prior to software rollouts, to make sure that designated hardware meets system requirements, and to identify existing applications with potential compatibility problems. An alarm function also informs administrators when a graphic card is exchanged or memory is removed.

The automation of daily operational IT tasks at the law firm now plays a key role in managing technology effectively. “Using Empirum Inventory to determine where RAM upgrades were required prior to migration saved a lot of manual effort,” Harris says. “We were able to easily determine which machines needed more RAM and even how many spare memory slots they had, so putting an accurate order for additional RAM together for each office was simple.”

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