Avecto Enables "Build Your Own Desktop" Environment for University of Dundee

Least Privilege Management empowers University users with a dynamic, self-service experience.

Avecto, the market leader in privilege management, today announced that Scotland's University of Dundee chose its Privilege Guard technology to manage end-user privileges within the University's newly created Trusted Source environment. By partnering with Avecto, the University of Dundee dramatically increased user empowerment and desktop flexibility, while significantly reducing time and costs spent on service requests and incidents.

As several of the University's departments prepared to migrate to Windows 7 from XP, the central IT department identified an opportunity to give users the flexibility to create their desktop of choice, while still maintaining the levels of security the University required. However, one hurdle they needed to overcome was the ability to let users install applications as needed, without granting excess privileges within the Windows 7 deployment.

The University worked with Avecto to eliminate users' need for admin rights, specifically in the Trusted Source environment, which allows staff to build their own desktops from a catalogue of approved applications. By deploying Privilege Guard, IT effectively kept all users on standard accounts, while giving applications admin rights. Privilege Guard's on-demand elevation functionality enabled IT to pre-approve updates on applications such as Adobe Flash and Oracle Java, which empowered users to install the updates themselves. As a result of this user empowerment, the University's IT department achieved substantial savings in time and resources, which were previously spent on update requests.

"Our 'WOW' moment was when we realized that we could keep everyone as a standard user on Windows 7 and use Privilege Guard to assign admin rights to the application or OS function," said Mark Stephenson, desktop infrastructure lead at the University of Dundee. "Historically, we dealt with a user base of varying IT capability, which resulted in continuous requests for simple procedures like installing printer drivers from a CD. These requests cost a significant amount of the team's time."

Privilege Guard's on-demand capabilities also delivers a user-focused service when the need arises for new applications. IT can check the request and respond back to the user as appropriate, either approving the application, or declining its use with a valid reason.

"The benefits of using Privilege Guard within our Trusted Source environment have been two-fold: first, we have enabled our Windows 7 community to manage their own desktops securely; and second, for the central IT function, it means we can offer better support to our end user community," said Stephenson. "Originally, we had more than 300 applications within Trusted Source, but this number is steadily increasing as more users come online. The benefit of Privilege Guard is illustrated in the significant drop in the number of application and printer install requests that we receive. This means that we now have the time to dedicate resources on the next big project."

Update: Privilege Guard is now Defendpoint

Privilege Guard has now evolved into the new security suite, Defendpoint, which encompasses Privilege Management, Application Control and Sandboxing. For more information, please visit www.avecto.com/defendpoint.