With so much of today’s university experience relying on students and staff being able to attend class remotely, access online resources, or conduct research on a university’s network, the accessibility and reliability of a university’s IT infrastructure has become more important than ever. A university’s IT infrastructure must be scalable, flexible, up-to-date, and available so online learning remains unimpeded.
The University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) in Australia, a top-ranked, international teaching and research university has been at the forefront of remote learning even before the Covid pandemic changed the university education experience. Director of ICT Operations, Phil George, leads a team of 25 full-time Client Support staff who manage 4,000 endpoints supporting 17,000 students and 1,600 faculty and staff in three separate cities. Add to these the constant advances in learning tools and technology, new systems and procedures, and you have a challenging IT environment to manage. The UniSQ team needed a way to efficiently keep pace with the constant technological advances. NinjaOne answers this need.
Why NinjaOne for UniSQ?
UniSQ put NinjaOne and seven other vendors to the test. And NinjaOne passed with flying colors. They chose NinjaOne because its complete endpoint management suite offers all the functionality the team needs including:
- Automated patch management
- Proactive trouble resolution
- Warranty tracking
- Fast onboarding and tool consolidation
Patch management
NinjaOne’s patch management tool is ideal for UniSQs complex environment that has Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems as well as an extensive list of third-party applications. With so many diverse access points, UniSQ is a prime target for cyber threats. NinjaOne’s patch automations enable the team to quickly identify exploits, deploy the patches, and closely monitor the status of critical patches through the same dashboard they use to manage their endpoints.
George says, “NinjaOne gives us the visibility and confidence that our endpoints are securely patched, maintained, and monitored because we’re backed by a platform which is incredibly well supported. It’s well understood. And it gets our environment.”
Proactive trouble resolution
With NinjaOne managing their endpoints, UniSQ’s IT team has become less reactive in their day-to-day activities. With proactive alerting, the team can address trouble tickets as they come in and resolve them before they impact end users.
Warranty tracking
Because UniSQ is a research university, it’s vital to keep close tabs on the warranty status for the machines under their purview. NinjaOne Warranty Tracking gives the UniSQ team clear visibility into all device warranty status, ensuring that devices stay available and important research isn’t compromised by an outdated machine.
Fast onboarding, tool consolidation
George was very happy with the onboarding process, saying “Having the NinjaOne team available to help us with the onboarding process was phenomenal.” And in the first 90 days, UniSQ was able to consolidate three tools into the NinjaOne platform, reducing context switching and saving the team time.
Another happy customer
The transition to NinjaOne was seamless, transparent, and easy. The NinjaOne platform continues to meet UniSQ’s diverse needs and George and his team are so happy with their more streamlined workflows and secure infrastructure, they’re planning to enroll their server fleet and additional staff, student, and lab devices into the NinjaOne platform. This would bring the overall total number of endpoints managed to over 6,000.
Read the full story to learn how UniSQ supports and secures its hybrid learning model with NinjaOne.
