My Name Is Rob Carruthers. I am a family practice physician in Nanaimo BC. I work in a three-physician clinic. We have about 4,000 patients. When we opened, the clinic had brand new computers, brand new Windows Operating System and brand new software and I didn’t really pay much attention to the network after that. If something broke we have the IT guys come and fix it and about a year ago I thought it's been quite a while since I've done any kind of auditor survey of our software so I thought maybe I'll use GFI LanGuard and get their free version for 30 days and do a tune up.
So after I did my tune up and found that Windows update was turned off completely on several computers, virus scanning wasn't working at all on several computers, many of the virus scanning databases weren't up to date, all sorts of software that interacts with the internet was completely out of date. So I worked for the 30 days and at the end of the 30 days the task was still not done and I thought I'll just pay the small amount that takes to get one year of ongoing support. Security updates occur very frequently with Windows. They occur very frequently with a lot of other products we use to access the internet, and if those aren't up to date in fact we can't sometimes use those programs, so updating the software actually allows us to be confident that when we do need a particular program it will work because it's up to date. I'm able to look after all 12 workstations with minimal amount of time which has now dropped down to basically a few minutes a week. The economic benefit is mainly time, so my time is worth a fair bit and if I contracted out patch management and vulnerability management to an IT company, I think we would be paying a $150 an hour. And if patches and updates are coming out every two to four weeks, somebody is in your office every two to four weeks that would be very expensive so in practical terms if you don't find another way to do this, it becomes almost unaffordable.
It's a well-designed program, it's easy to use. Microsoft Word isn’t hard to use but this is probably easier in some ways than Microsoft Word. A non-technical person, someone familiar with PCs but not an IT professional can install it, they can run it. It does most of the work in the background. You install the console on one PC, agents, small programs are installed on the other computers. The agents report back to the console as to the status of each workstation. You can review the status from the console, and then you can implement fixes from the console, the agents will implement the fixes and they will do it at a time that you designate so you can say: oh I would like Java updated on the 6 workstations that are currently not up to date. Scheduled out for 1 a.m. and the next day those will all be updated when you check your console the morning they are all fine again.
We have very very highly confidential data patient medical records, I think about as confidential as people can imagine. It's as important as making records. It is our responsibility as physicians to protect that data. Employees basically don't see any of the maintenance being done. It is always being done after hours and on weekends occasionally but for the most part, it's just after hours so the security updating is invisible.
There were hundreds of vulnerabilities on our network before I implemented LanGuard now there are zero known vulnerabilities. that's as good as LanGuard is.
