How SJRC Texas Took IT In-House with NinjaOne
Industry
- Non-Profit
Location
- United States
Products
- Endpoint Management, Patch Management, SentinelOne Integration, Ticketing
Results
- 11 MEMBERS OF AN IN-HOUSE IT DEPARTMENT
- 150+ TICKETS CLOSED WEEKLY
- 0 UNPROTECTED ENDPOINTS
Industry
- Non-Profit
Location
- United States
Products
- Endpoint Management, Patch Management, SentinelOne Integration, Ticketing
- Published
Overview
SJRC Texas, formerly St. Jude’s Ranch for Children Texas, is a San Antonio-based nonprofit that helps children reach what the organization calls “permanency” – a stable, safe home, whether through reunification, kinship placement, or adoption. The organization has grown to over 700 employees spread across 28 counties, from Bexar County to a rural stretch of Texas that runs from Eagle Pass to Victoria to Uvalde to near Corpus Christi, a service area SJRC lovingly calls “the donut.”
Lanning joined SJRC Texas in 2022 as its first-ever internal IT employee, hired initially to help liase with an existing MSP relationship and support roughly 200 new employees joining from a newly acquired rural region. He asked for help almost immediately: that first hire, an IT technician, is now one of the organization’s infrastructure engineers. In 2024, IT moved under the CFO, and Lanning asked for two months to get his bearings and two more people. One of those hires became his director of IT and, in his words, his right-hand man. Developing existing staff into new roles and responsibilities is part of how Tim leads his team.
Two years later, Lanning, now Vice President of IT, leads a small IT department that runs on NinjaOne for endpoint management, patching, ticketing, and security across a workforce that is almost entirely remote. Most SJRC Texas employees get a laptop, a company phone, and monitors if their role calls for it, then spend their days driving to home visits, court hearings, and case meetings across two of the state’s largest and most geographically dispersed regions.
SJRC Texas is responsible for managing HIPAA data for children and families navigating the state’s child welfare system, work that spans hundreds of remote employees, court hearings, and home visits across that same sprawling service area.
You’d have to strap me down to a chair and tape my mouth shut to get me to stop talking about how awesome NinjaOne is.”
Tim Lanning, Vice President of IT, SJRC Texas
Challenge
Out-sourced IT hampered SJRC Texas’ potential for growth
When Lanning came on board, he worked alongside the Executive team to develop a roadmap that would bring the IT helpdesk process in-house, strengthen the IT posture, and save the organization expense from an external provider. In doing so, he was able to more closely align the technology posture to SJRC Texas’ needs.
“Before NinjaOne, our IT tools and manual processes were in need of revamping,” Lanning said, “because we had never had internal IT before!” IT requests were routed through a shared mailbox accessed by multiple different internal teams, including IT and Data. It was increasingly difficult to organize the requests appropriately, with the addition of 200 new staff. Bringing on more staff also brought a desire to increase the level of antivirus protection across the organization.
Solution: Why SJRC Texas chose NinjaOne
One platform for a lean, fast-growing IT team
When SJRC Texas’s CFO gave Lanning the green light to bring IT in-house while rolling off the MSP, his pitch was simple: he needed a way to remote into computers and a real ticketing system to replace the shared Outlook inbox. NinjaOne delivered both, plus far more than he expected.
Rolling out the NinjaOne agent through the MSP’s existing RMM was seamless, and Active Directory integration was immediate. “I plugged it in, and just like that, all of our on-prem systems were there,” Lanning said. “I had no headaches. It was smooth, and that’s where I began to see the real potential.”
That same simplicity carried into security. Learning that NinjaOne partnered with SentinelOne, Lanning transitioned to a new antivirus immediately. “It was as easy as approving an invoice and turning on the functionality,” he said. “I pressed a few buttons, and suddenly I had a highly functional antivirus across our entire organization.”
Day to day, the two platforms split naturally by role. SJRC Texas’s cybersecurity analyst lives in the SentinelOne dashboard, while Lanning tracks the same activity inside NinjaOne. “I don’t really need to look at the SentinelOne console, because I can see it all in NinjaOne,” he said. If the analyst is ever out, SentinelOne alerts can route straight into the ticketing queue, so nothing waits on one person.
Ticketing built for a department this size
On the ticketing side, custom statuses and multiple assignees gave a small team the structure to track hundreds of requests a week in a robust ticketing system, rather than a swamped shared mailbox. Lanning built an entire documentation flow in Obsidian mapping how tickets move through his department, something he says only works because of the flexibility in NinjaOne’s event-based automation rules.
Lanning’s team also leans heavily on NinjaOne’s template and script library, including prebuilt scripts for Dell Command BIOS updates that used to require walking technicians through sensitive manual processes one machine at a time. “The NinjaOne template library is our best friend,” he said.
A community that keeps giving back
Support has extended well beyond the platform itself. Lanning is an active member of NinjaOne’s Discord community and its IT Leadership Lab program, where he now leads a cohort of IT leaders. “NinjaOne is one of the most refreshing vendors to work with and communicate with,” he said. “The culture that you have is infectious.”
Results & Outcomes
Real savings, safer systems, and data-backed decisions
Moving off the MSP freed up the necessary funding to allow SJRC Texas, a nonprofit accountable for every dollar on its Form 990, to reallocate more funds to its mission instead. Lanning says the bigger win is time. “I could put a million dollars a month on how much time this saves me, time I’m not spending worrying about things,” he said.
Ticketing data has also given Lanning a case for growth. When ticket volume trended up, his team used the numbers, not guesswork, to justify adding additional technicians to his support staff. “All I had to do was present the numbers,” he said. NinjaOne’s reporting allowed the data to speak for itself. Without a ticketing system at this scale, he says the math would run the other way: “It would cost more, and I’d have no real way to know the right staffing level. I’d probably be running understaffed.”
Security ROI that is hard to put a price on
On the security side, NinjaOne’s relationship with cybersecurity experts gave SJRC Texas access to SentinelOne coverage across the organization. Almost overnight, the cybersecurity posture went from compliant to exceptional, along with visibility into every managed device from a single console. Lanning cannot put a dollar figure on what that risk reduction is worth to a nonprofit but he is certain of the value. “We flipped a switch, and suddenly we had robust protection across the board. How do you put a price on that?” he said. “NinjaOne is worth every penny.”
Patch compliance has followed the same trajectory. “Our compliance is better than I could have ever dreamed it would be,” Lanning said.
What it means for the kids and families served
For an organization handling HIPAA data on behalf of some of Texas’s most vulnerable children and families, that reliability carries weight beyond IT. “From IT’s perspective, we simply don’t have to worry about these things,” Lanning said. “Every level of the organization knows that IT is looking out for them, and that makes the whole process more seamless.”
Lanning ties the whole effort back to SJRC Texas’s mission. “The work we do is important. “Our goal is to do things the right way, efficiently and without excuses. That’s where NinjaOne has provided the most value to us.”