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In my previous SmartAuditor blog post, I described how SmartAuditor works and its benefits for improving security and regulatory compliance. Well, guess what? Recently, a major healthcare company (obviously highly regulated by HIPAA) with tens of thousands of employees shared with me their thoughts, experiences, and main use cases regarding our SmartAuditor technology. In addition to providing care and services, this healthcare company partners with numerous nursing homes, hospitals and other healthcare organizations in the United States. The interesting part is that the more I talk to customers about SmartAuditor for recording ICA sessions, the more interesting the use cases get. So here's their success story.
Background
This customer offshore most of their development to India, had employees and non-employees accessing production systems remotely on a daily basis and wanted to monitor what they were doing, and needed to deliver custom applications in a faster way. They started using the SmartAuditor technology since it was released as a beta a little over two years ago.
The Challenges
The main challenges for this customer were:
- How to track and monitor IT change control?
- How to ensure employees comply with company policies?
- How to allow offshore developers to see user interaction with custom applications in QA and test environments?
Use Case #1: IT change control management
The customer had a lot of employees and non-employees logging in remotely to production systems on a daily basis and wanted to monitor them and ensure they were compliant (especially tracking the activity of users offshore). In order to improve security and compliance, they set up a secure portal using Citrix Access Gateway and turned on the SmartAuditor capabilities of Citrix XenApp. So by using SmartAuditor, any time a developer, employee or non-employee access the production system, all the ICA sessions are being recorded, making sure that they are keeping up with company policies.
Use Case #2: Rapid application delivery
Like most businesses, this customer has some fragile and complex applications and users that just don't get it. So instead of releasing an application into production and having users call the help desk trying to diagnose problems, this customer put SmartAuditor ahead of the process. The customer turned SmartAuditor on before the application was fully delivered into production. They took the application and released it only to their test users and generated a list with issues. Then, with the rapid playback and bookmarking capabilities of SmartAuditor, the developers very quickly diagnosed what was wrong with the application and made the changes. The main benefits the customer got out of this were that they were able to deliver the application to market quicker and that the application was clean. By doing this, they have minimized the number of help desk calls and problem resolution for this application.
The Benefits
The main benefits for this customer were:
- Enhanced auditing for improving compliance
- Encouraged employees to comply with company policies. The customer is watching and recording. People log in, get out, and stick to the script.
- Improved the quality of the application development process by visually seeing problems and accelerating time-to-resolution
- The rapid playback and bookmarking capabilities saved time. Experts were able to find the issues and solved them right away.
The Results
- Low storage requirements
- With SmartAuditor, compression over a period of time was very good. The customer has been using SmartAuditor for over 2 years. In that period of time, they recorded 8,222 sessions which only required 43GB of storage space. On average, that's a 5.2MB file size per recorded session. Wow!
- Excellent performance when recording and reviewing sessions
- Faster application delivery and better user acceptance
How are you using SmartAuditor? What has been your experience with this feature of XenApp?
Comments (5)
Mar 27, 2008
Anonymous says:
Is SmartAuditor ever going to be integrated into EdgeSight? It would be co...Is SmartAuditor ever going to be integrated into EdgeSight? It would be cool to be able to launch a recorded session directly from the console and tie it back to metrics.
Apr 01, 2008
Carlos Nieves says:
We have heard similar requests from other customers regarding the integration of...We have heard similar requests from other customers regarding the integration of SmartAuditor into EdgeSight. It is an enhancement request we are evaluating for a future release. Please email me your contact info at carlos.nieves@citrix.com if you are interested in talking to someone in Product Marketing and Product Management about this.
May 11, 2008
Anonymous says:
Hi Carlos,We have installed and configured SmartAuditor on two new virtual Plati...Hi Carlos,We have installed and configured SmartAuditor on two new virtual Platinum Edition 4.5 servers and it is working fine. Just had a couple of queries regarding the recorded sessions.Is there a way to manipulate the recorded session folders and files?1. Change the folder structure to a different one - based on the recorded user name maybe?2. Change the file name to something more meaningful - based on the recorded user name maybe?3. Control access to specific recorded sessions to specific reviewers?Thanks,Regards,Roland D'souzaSenior Systems Engineer, ASX LimitedLevel 2, 20 Bridge Street,Sydney, NSW 2000, AustraliaPO BoxH224, Australia Square,Sydney, NSW 2000, AustraliaTel: +61 2 92270588, Mobile: +61 0404 018 460, Fax: +61 2 92270849Email: Roland.Dsouza@asx.com.auWeb: www.asx.com.au
May 16, 2008
Cris Lau says:
Hi Roland, let me take your questions in 3 parts: Change the folder structure...Hi Roland, let me take your questions in 3 parts:
2. Change the file name to something more meaningful - based on the recorded user name maybe? The information specific to the recording is stored as metadata. It is possible for the admin to later on change the filename if a specific file needs to be shared with someone else. If you can also help me better understand the use case as well.
3. Control access to specific recorded sessions to specific reviewers? You can set this up for all recording, but there isn't a way to authorize specific reviewers to specific recordings. You can have workarounds, like setup different file permission in Windows and silo the apps you want to record... but it's not something we do out of the box, is it? At the same time, you are looking to prevent an unauthorized user from viewing the file, the playback encryption feature grants only the authorized admin to playback the recording.
I hope this helps.
Cris
Jul 08, 2008
Anonymous says:
I have a question on the comment in point (3). Since the data files f...I have a question on the comment in point (3).
Since the data files for the recorded sessions cannot be re-organised by username, then how should we setup Windows file permission to prevent a specific user to review a specific recording. Is it possible that there are 2 separate recordings (say, from client A and client B) are stored on the same data file ?
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