Challenge

As a leading provider of technology-enabled insurance outsourcing solutions, 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 seven 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 distributed across North America, India, and the Philippines.  

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 five legacy IT products making scale nearly impossible: “There were just too many inefficiencies that took up the team’s time,” said Thompson. “We needed to mature our IT department 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 RMM solutions, but found them too clunky or unnecessarily complex. Nothing his team scoped fit the bill until they discovered NinjaOne.

Solution

Consolidating Into an All-in-One, Scalable Platform 

“The exciting thing about NinjaOne is that it is a one-stop shop. We can do desktop management, remote management, software deployment and patch management. Plus, everything is in one dashboard. That is amazing for us! NinjaOne has all the bells and whistles of other centralized configuration managers, but without the expensive price tag,” said Global Director of IT Operations, John Kavati. 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.”  

Winning with Automation 

Before adopting NinjaOne, Patra’s IT Department was projecting the need to ramp up hiring. 
With NinjaOne, many of the manual tasks that consumed countless human-hours were eliminated.  

“Because of NinjaOne’s feature set, automations, and overall simplicity, we were not only able to save hundreds of human-hours of manual work, we were able to effectively eliminate the workload equivalent to that of eighteen full-time technicians per major deployment,” said Thompson.  

One example that Thompson fondly remembers was 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 at least three months, took about 15 hours of total work with NinjaOne.”  

The efficiencies continued to compound and scale. Thompson stated that through NinjaOne’s ability to automate workstation policies and antivirus management, his global IT team is saving hundreds of hours on manual tasks every month. And thanks to automated patch management and auditing, Thompson’s 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 redeploy disk encryption software to all 6,000 endpoints.  

Thompson shared: “As the IT world continues to evolve, system administrators always have to be looking for the next level of improvement. In this instance, our IT team determined we needed to redeploy our disk encryption software to further enhance our security posture. 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 automated the redeployment of the disk encryption, reboot the system, validate the installation, and pull the recovery keys for safe storage. That saved us thousands of hours in technician time and minimized the interruption to our end users. But even more valuable, was NinjaOne pulling the recovery key and storing it, removing any chance for human error to lose it.”  

Conclusion

For Patra, the benefit of replacing their 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 as efficiently 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. I am thrilled that at the end of the week, I can tell my team to enjoy their weekend, spend time with their families, and not worry about our IT environment outside of scheduled tasks because I know NinjaOne is monitoring and supporting us.”