BeyondTrust

Today, Bomgar announced the Student Health Services at the University of North Carolina Charlotte is using its remote support solution to provide secure, HIPAA-compliant support to systems, servers and devices throughout the campus. UNC Charlotte’s Student Health Services is comprised of a Student Health Center and a Wellness Center that serve the healthcare needs of the approximately 29,000 students and more than 3,400 faculty and staff at the university. 

The office of information technology at UNC Charlotte supports the IT needs of the staff and clinicians working in Student Health Services, as well as managing routine maintenance on the various technologies used, including medical diagnostic devices. 

With buildings at complete opposite sides of the campus, and more devices being added to the mix, the need for efficient support became apparent. 

“When I came to Student Health Services six years ago, there was an ad hoc collection of remote support tools for different devices, but no comprehensive remote support solution,” said Brian Bard, business and technology analyst for UNCC Student Health Services. “At that point, I was the only person in the department and the Counseling Center was on the opposite side of the campus from the Student Health Center. I wanted to improve our responsiveness and felt remote support was the way to do that. I had used Bomgar at the previous university where I worked and knew it was an easy-to-use solution that would meet our remote support needs.” 

Bard developed a proposal comparing the benefits of Bomgar to other tools, such as LogMeIn and TeamViewer. It became clear that Bomgar was the best choice due to its perpetual software updates, license structure, disaster recovery capabilities, ease of set-up and management, and most important, security. “It wasn’t hard to make the business case for selecting Bomgar initially, and the solution has just gotten more robust over time.”

Selecting the most secure remote support solution was of critical importance because Student Health Services handles confidential patient data and must comply with HIPAA regulations.

Bomgar works through Student Health Services’ firewall without VPN tunneling, which enables the perimeter security to remain intact.  

Bomgar also enhances the security of vendor access to the medical records system at UNC Charlotte. 

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Previously, the only way we could let vendors remote in was to set up a VPN. I didn’t like that because I couldn’t see or control what theywere doing on our network. With Bomgar, we can give them limited access to our environment and record their session so I have an audit log of exactly what has been done. That makes our environment much more secure.

Brian Bard, Business and Technology Analyst for UNCC Student Health Services

With Bomgar, the typical response time from incident reporting to resolution has been reduced from approximately 6 hours to 15 minutes. 

“Just not having to spend 30 minutes walking across campus saves us a ton of time,” said Bard. 

“But other helpful features like File Transfer and Canned Scripts streamline the work that we need to do.”

Looking ahead, UNC Charlotte is planning to deploy Bomgar’s password management solution to improve password security. Since the institution has several servers that are regularly accessed by various team members, they need a more secure and efficient way to manage and store credentials. Using Bomgar Vault integrated with Bomgar Remote Support, a rep can simply inject the credentials needed to access a specific server or system, without ever knowing or seeing them. “Credential injection will be a tremendous convenience for us,” said Bard. 

For more details about UNC Charlotte’s use of Bomgar, check out the full case study!

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