Helix Financial

Success Story

Seeking to improve security and increase efficiency within the IT department, Helix Financial worked with PC Solutions, a Novell partner, to implement Novell ZENworks Asset Management and Novell ZENworks Patch Management. The Novell solutions are helping Helix Financial to improve software licence management and asset management, and to significantly reduce patch and asset management workload.

Overview

Helix Financial is an international boutique consulting firm that provides professional services and technology solutions to all facets of the commercial real estate, structured finance and investment management industries. The company employs approximately 150 people, and leverages its offshore human resources in Gurgaon, India, to deliver highly cost-effective services to clients in the US and Europe.

Challenge

Like most companies, Helix Financial has a heterogeneous IT infrastructure. Its data centre in Gurgaon, India, contains a number of virtualised servers. The company also maintains an estate of around 140 desktop PCs in India, and laptops for senior managers and consultants in the US and Europe.

"As we work primarily with companies in the financial sector, our clients are very concerned about IT security," said Bharat Tank, IT Manager at Helix Financial. "It is crucial for us to ensure that all our machines are always up-to-date in terms of security patches. However, since our IT setup was growing, patch management was becoming a real pain-point, especially as our IT administration team is relatively small."

The company decided to find a solution that would help reduce the patch management workload, and provide more precise, granular control of its IT assets.

Novell solution

"With Novell ZENworks Patch Management we can ensure that every patch is fully tested before we roll it out."

Bharat Tank
IT Manager
Helix Financial

Helix Financial had been relying on Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to automatically deploy operating system patches, but still had to perform most application patches manually. The company began to investigate solutions that could integrate and automate OS and application patching, and consulted PC Solutions, a Novell Business Partner.

PC Solutions helped Helix Financial implement Novell ZENworks Asset Management and Novell ZENworks Patch Management, to provide a central point of control that would provide accurate information on all the PCs, servers and laptops in the company's infrastructure.

Helix Director Ashwani Awasthi played a key role in the decision and overall success of the project. "PC Solutions did a great job," said Tank. "We were expecting to have to deploy a new physical server for the Novell ZENworks software, but we were able to virtualise the environment using VMware. By optimising the utilisation of our existing hardware resources, PC Solutions helped us deliver this project much more cost-effectively."

Novell ZENworks Asset Management helps the company's IT team obtain a clear view of which versions of which software are installed on which machines - so it is easy to find out software and hardware details on any machine in the Helix infrastructure. Meanwhile, Novell ZENworks Patch Management notifies the team whenever an update for one of the company's applications becomes available, assists with patch testing, and automates the rollout to selected machines.

"One key advantage is the extra control that the Novell solution gives us in terms of testing, plus controlling system-restart and roll-back," said Tank. "Our previous Microsoft solution would sometimes deploy patches that were not suitable for our environment, which meant that we had to roll back to a previous state - causing disruption and frequent system-restarts, and wasting a lot of time. With Novell ZENworks Patch Management we can ensure that every patch is fully tested before we roll it out."

Equally, with the new solution, there is no need for IT staff to continually visit individual machines to take inventory or deploy patches. This saves significant time and effort, enabling the team to focus on higher-value tasks.

Results

The combination of Novell ZENworks software and the expertise of PC Solutions has helped us create an asset and patch management solution that delivers real value for Helix Financial."

Bharat Tank
IT Manager
Helix Financial

By enabling automated and centralised patch management, Novell ZENworks provides Helix Financial with better protection against vulnerabilities, viruses and malicious attacks - helping the company safeguard its clients' data.

"Our focus on the financial sector makes security a really crucial issue," said Tank. "Novell ZENworks helps us give our customers peace of mind that their data is safe."

Novell ZENworks Patch Management and Novell ZENworks Asset Management provide centralised consoles, significantly reducing manual workload for the company's IT team by almost eliminating the need for staff to visit individual machines to install patches or take inventories.

"We can now manage our entire global infrastructure remotely, which means that the team in India can handle the majority of IT management tasks even for the US and European operations," said Tank. "Moreover, the automation of patch management reduces our IT administration workload by around 35 percent - saving perhaps two or three man-days per week."

Another advantage is that Novell ZENworks Asset Management enables Tank's team to monitor the use of IT resources much more accurately. Since the software can generate reports about which applications and operating systems are installed on which machines, it is easier to calculate how many software licences the company needs to buy - reducing expenditure and ensuring compliance with licensing agreements.

"The combination of Novell ZENworks software and the expertise of PC Solutions has helped us create an asset and patch management solution that delivers real value for Helix Financial," said Tank.