Budget-conscious NGO cuts costs and improves IT productivity with Symantec

By Victor Ng | Jan 19, 2010

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St. James’ Settlement, a non-governmental organization (NGO), has deployed Symantec Endpoint Protection, Symantec Backup Exec and Altiris Management Suite to centralize its IT environment and reduce staff time spent on data protection and software inventories.

With an annual budget of US$38 million, St James’ Settlement aims to improve the social welfare of Hong Kong citizens. Its 30 branches provide a number of services including Family & Counseling Services, Elderly Services, Rehabilitation Services, Youth Services and Charity Projects Development. A central IT team of three employees previously managed the IT across the organization in a decentralized approach.

However, with a limited budget, the company required a centralized IT system that would enable its IT staff to reduce the cost and time spent on IT processes, without compromising the protection of its data, and enable the IT team to refocus their time on more strategic activities.

“It’s very important for us to protect the privacy of client data,” said Terry Lau, IT manager at St James’ Settlement. “Administration of our
antivirus software was haphazard and we drastically needed to improve our IT productivity and the effectiveness of how we protected our data by streamlining the way we managed it.”

The central IT staff previously spent two to three hours a week checking the status of antivirus protection and five hours a week cleaning up any
threat activity. With Symantec Endpoint Protection, St. James’ Settlement is now able to secure data across 700 client workstations with minimal disruption in service to end users. The solution includes antivirus functionality, as well as device control, both of which can be managed through a single console. The new solution saves the central IT team around eight hours a week.

The volume of data requiring centralized backup at St James’ Settlement is currently 400GB, which is increasing at an annual rate of 15%. The deployment of Symantec Backup Exec has resulted in IT staff only having to spend two hours a week to ensure the protection of this data, a
reduction of about 80%.

Previously IT staff manually backed up the NGO’s servers daily, requiring two hours a day and consumed a great deal of network bandwidth resulting in regular network performance issues for end-users. Backups now run at midnight, eliminating the daily two hour network disruption.

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