About Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation
Fairchild Semiconductor is the leading global supplier of high-performance power products critical to today's leading electronic applications in the computing, communications, consumer, industrial, and automotive segments. Fairchild's 9,000 employees design, manufacture and market power, analog and mixed signal, interface, logic, and optoelectronics products.
Challenge
Fairchild had a diverse end-user computing environment across its 26 worldwide sites. Each local IT group had its own way of managing PCs and user support. The IT staff was also on the road frequently throughout the year supporting desktops, as well as disparate file and print environments. With a large percentage of the company's employee's traveling regularly, difficulty accessing and sharing files while working in other offices was common.
Fairchild wanted to give users easy, secure information access from any location, as well as simplify PC management across a global enterprise.
Novell Solution
Fairchild determined that it needed a standard solution for user authentication and hired a consulting firm to recommend a streamlined solution. After evaluating Fairchild's current environment and reviewing the major alternatives, the consulting firm recommended a Novell security and identity solution based on ease of implementation, security, and lower total cost of ownership.
"Controlling access to confidential information and intellectual property is vital to our business," said Marguerite Whited, Enterprise Client Services Manager at Fairchild Semiconductor. "With Novell, we can secure our data, while making sure users have easy access to information, regardless of location."
The Fairchild team used a Novell migration and consolidation tool to migrate all of its domains to the Novell eDirectory™. The company now has a single repository for the user identity information of 3,500 office workers. Novell Identity Manager synchronizes this user information across multiple applications so employees can access these applications using a single user name and password.
"The Novell eDirectory solution has unified our worldwide file and print environment for the first time," said Whited. "With Novell identity management, many of our users went from seven passwords to one. User feedback has been very positive." Fairchild plans to extend the Novell identity management solution to its ERP systems and other core business applications worldwide.
As with all public companies, compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, is a requirement of doing business. "For applications and data that are authenticated with Novell, we can now perform audits quickly and accurately." said Whited. "With a few clicks, we can tell exactly who has access to specific applications and data."
Application delivery no longer involves traveling, shipping CDs, or touching each PC. With Novell ZENworks®, the company's IT staff can deliver new applications overnight to all locations where the local IT staff can automatically "push" the applications to PCs. The IT staff can now image new machines in a matter of minutes, rather than several hours, including remotely re-imaging machines for users in any location.
"The previous process for our OS security patches used to be a nightmare," said Whited. "We never really knew the status of patch installs worldwide. In some cases, one set of patches was not completely deployed before the next one came around. With ZENworks, we can distribute patches to all PCs within just a few days of their release and track them from a central location."
"Because we have many small offices without local IT staff, we take full advantage of the remote control features in Novell ZENworks," said Whited. "For example, we can take control of a machine in Shanghai and fix it in minutes. The IT staff no longer needs to travel for software-related PC issues."
PC asset management tasks, such as license tracking, are also made easier with Novell ZENworks and the ability to automatically generate reports. "We are a company focused on automation, so it only makes sense that we use ZENworks to automate as much as possible," said Whited.
Results
With a Novell security and identity Solution, Fairchild has increased data security and simplified user access by giving employees a single ID and password for many applications. Employees can now easily access and share files from any location, improving their productivity and significantly decreasing the number of helpdesk calls.
"Novell eDirectory has enabled consistent application and data security," said Whited. "This provides us with a centralized world view of user information that we can manage with decentralized support personnel."
By standardizing its environment with ZENworks, Fairchild has been able to reduce travel time for the IT staff, while providing more responsive support to users in all locations. With Novell solutions, Fairchild has been able to reduce desktop support costs and has lowered hardware costs through server consolidation efforts.