Challenge
Simplifying and Scaling IT Management
As a leading provider of insurance technology, Patra Corporation has changed the way insurance companies sell, deliver, and manage both policies and customers. Its product has been so well received by the insurance industry that Inc. 5000 has listed Patra as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies for six years running. In the last year alone, Patra added over 1,000 new employees to its global workforce, bringing its total to just over 6,000 people distributed across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Of course, with hypergrowth comes growing pains, particularly for IT teams responsible for deploying, securing, and maintaining all of a company’s new and existing endpoints.
Kyle Thompson, Patra’s manager of global infrastructure operations, shared, “Patra’s IT team was in catch-up mode in terms of personnel. We needed to hire to keep pace with the rest of the company.” It didn’t help that Patra’s previous solution was a patchwork of IT products making scale nearly impossible: there was N-able N-Central for Windows servers, Microsoft Intune for Windows workstations, Ansible for Linux workstations, and Splashtop for remote support. “There were just too many inefficiencies that took up the team’s time,” said Thompson. “We needed to mature as an organization and bring our IT stack into a single pane. We needed a unified solution that could scale.”
Coming from the MSP world, Thompson was familiar with many legacy solutions like Kaseya and ManageEngine but found them too clunky or unnecessarily complex. Nothing his team scoped fit the bill until they discovered NinjaOne.
Solution: Why Patra Chose NinjaOne
One Unified Platform
“The exciting thing about NinjaOne is that it is a one-stop shop. We can do desktop management, remote management, software deployment, patch management, and everything is in one dashboard. That is amazing for us! NinjaOne has all the bells and whistles of a SCCM, but without the expensive price tag,” said John Kavati, Global Director of IT Operations.
The user-friendly, all-in-one solution made deploying NinjaOne to all 6,000 endpoints “painless! A 10 out of 10 experience,” shared Thompson. “The support team was super helpful and the articles in the NinjaOne Dojo made it immensely easy to do just about anything. And, whenever we had questions, the response from NinjaOne was almost instantaneous. This level of support allowed us to deploy NinjaOne to all our endpoints in 30 days.”
Kavati added, “This was the fastest, most seamless change management process that we have experienced in recent memory. NinjaOne is so intuitive that it took our team less than two weeks to understand how to use it.”
Results & Outcomes
Winning with Automation
Before adopting NinjaOne, Thompson was projecting the need to hire eighteen full-time technicians based on previous years’ trends and Patra’s current growth rate. After adopting NinjaOne, Thompson’s team was able to reduce or shift those resources to other purposes.
“Because of NinjaOne’s feature set, automations, and overall simplicity, we were not only able to save thousands of hours of manual work, we also avoided the need to hire any new technicians. That directly translated to the ability to pay our current employees more, give them more opportunities for professional development, and enable them to take more time off,” said Thompson.
One example Thompson fondly remembers is when his team used NinjaOne to deploy a new VPN to around 5,000 endpoints in India.
“Before NinjaOne, the process would have taken months, a lot of manual hours, because we also had to push configuration files out so that the software could know which connections are available and enable employees to immediately start using it normally. But with just under five hours of work on my part to develop the deployment script, and a handful of hours testing it, we were able to get the VPN and configuration files deployed in about two days with automation scripts. What would have normally taken us three months or longer took about 15 hours of total work with NinjaOne.”
The efficiencies continued to compound and scale. Thompson estimated that through NinjaOne’s ability to automate workstation policies and antivirus management, his global IT team saves 50 to 100 hours per week. Thanks to automated patch management and auditing, Thompson is saving an additional 40 hours per month.
On the helpdesk side, automating software installation has saved Kavati’s team a ton of time. “Instead of doing a manual push — remoting into someone’s machine, manually pushing and installing the software — NinjaOne can do all of that for any number of computers at the same time. That saves us a lot of time and money,” shared Kavati.
This was the case when Patra’s IT team once again leveraged NinjaOne’s script automation to deploy BitLocker to all 6,000 endpoints. Thompson shared:
“As part of our ISO and SOC requirements, anything that contains business data has to be encrypted. To ensure compliance, we needed to deploy BitLocker to all of our endpoints. Normally, the deployment process would need to be done in phases — you have to enable it, let it run, reboot, jump back on to make sure it works, pull the encryption keys — usually it’s a very painful, manual process. NinjaOne essentially removed that pain. We were able to run a script that automatically deployed BitLocker, rebooted, validated the installation process, and pulled the encryption key. That saved us 3,000 hours of manual labor. But even more valuable was NinjaOne pulling the encryption key and storing it, removing any chance for human error to lose it.”
Time, Money, and Headcount Saved at Scale
For Patra, the benefit of replacing its previously overcrowded and overly complex IT stack with NinjaOne’s unified solution cannot be overstated. “The convenience of single tool administration has tremendously benefited not just the IT team, but our entire business,” said Kavati.
Thompson added, “Patra employees are happy with the services we’re giving them because we’re able to do it faster, better, and with very little interference with their work. These are things we could never do before. NinjaOne has made business life simpler. On the IT side, NinjaOne has allowed us to not only save time but give it back to our employees so they can go home at the end of the day to be with their families instead of worrying and working overtime. As a people person, that’s huge.”
With NinjaOne, Patra’s global IT team now saves up to 100 hours per week, cut 3,000 hours of manual labor out of its BitLocker rollout, deployed a new VPN 32 times faster than its old manual process, and avoided hiring 18 additional technicians — all while supporting 6,000 endpoints across three continents.