The University of Winchester is an educational institution in the United Kingdom with a strong heritage and innovatice teaching model. Their 5,900+ students enjoy educational challenges in 17 different departments at the hands of over 650 staff members.
With an environment consisting of predominantly students, the University found itself in an unusual IT situation. Over 1,500 Windows desktops operate over 7,000 user accounts: managing such a network is a large task! When you add in remote desktops and necessary applications that require admin rights to run, the conundrum increases significantly. While the University's IT team understood that eliminating administrator rights would increase security and compliance, as well as decrease the risk of malware, it was a difficult endeavor to put in place. Because of the amount of users, as well as a large number of legacy applications requiring admin rights to run, the IT management team were unsure of how to manage the access rights while maintaing necessary productivity levels.
This is where BeyondTrust's PowerBroker Desktops came in. The University of Winchester was first drawn to the solution from a webinar based on Desktop Standard. A year later, PowerBroker Desktops (then known as Privilege Manager) was evaluated and selected as the solution to satisfy security, compliance, and productivity. The biggest benefit was being able to lock down users while still allowing them to run all required applications.
