Transcript
And at the Belgian Pork Group we have eight production sites where we do everything with the pig, from slaughtering to dividing it in pieces and then making sausages from that meat. I'm the IT manager here and I manage four different teams. First of all support guys, so we have three people doing dedicated support duties, then I have three persons on infrastructure and then we have two teams of business consultants and they are divided between the guys who are working on production stuff, so making sure that the lines run smoothly, correctly, that we do, that we label them correct. And then the other team are business consultants for the administration part, so helping with everything that has to do with factoration, with the billing, so with transport, ECMR, PEPOL, stuff like that. The IT environment at the Belgian Pork Group is quite complex. We have here at Westvleet the central site and then we have seven other production sites which have smaller IT. Here we host two or three physical servers with eight or ten virtual ones on top, but here at Westvleet we are the main data center, the main hub for all data and user interactions. We have at the moment 14 physical hosts which host roughly between 150 and 200 servers and we as a team manage 350 IT users. I do believe that security is important for each company, not only ours, but here at the Belgian Pork Group we do focus on security. We have a dedicated person who is busy with security and the implementation of it. Like they say, it's not the question when are we or are we going to be attacked, no, it's when are we going to be attacked. It will happen and we do take a lot of actions security-wise just to ensure that the attack services for the Belgian Pork Group is as small as possible. In the past we do have some issues managing our users and security groups and stuff like that. It was always done manually, so when a new user was needed for a new employee, we started in Active Directory, we created the user, we added them into groups. So that was a very time-consuming operation just to create one user. So that's why we sought a solution that can manage that for us. And then at CyberSec two years ago I met Robin and the team from Certalink and they talked about the AD Manager solution and for me it was, oh yeah, that's the solution that we need. Then together with the team from Certalink we created an onboarding procedure and now creating a user is done in minutes instead of a day. So I'm very happy with the implementation and the solution itself. We talked with some colleagues of yourself from ManageEngine who came over here. It was very nice that we can just talk with engineers from the supplier side. We have that question, ah okay, you can solve it that way. So that helped us a lot in the implementation and the way we work with the program itself. In the beginning we started searching for another ITSM tool because we have a current tool that nobody here in our office is really happy in using it. So we needed another tool, ITSM, RMM, so remote control for end devices. Also asset management is a completely different tool as of now. So we were searching for a tool that covered it all. And then I went to the booth at CyberSec and I was talking and, ah okay, we need something for the onboarding and offboarding of users. Ah, we have AD Manager, ah okay, we need some more insights in who is doing what on our domain. Ah, we have RDAudit. It was a very easy step into the program because we knew the ManageEngine Service Desk Plus is the package that we want. But then we have the plugins from RDA Manager and it coexists with Service Desk Plus. The same for RDAudit, the same with Ops Manager that we also want to look into next year. So it's a single pane of glass program for each program. So it was for us very clear that ManageEngine was the solution for us. We made customizations in the RDA Manager solution itself because onboarding of a new user is not the same in each company. For example, we have different sites and different departments. So we have HR in our site here at Westlease. We also have HR in KUVAMIT and all the other sites. But that does not mean that every person from HR has the rights on the same folders. So for us it was okay, we create a user. This is his primary site that he'll work on. This is the function that the person has. So with the combination of those two, we can create a set of file shares that those persons have access to. And that was some of the stuff that we did customization within the RDA Manager solution. Also for the offboarding, now we are running certain scripts just to have a recollection of that user was in that folder and that folder so that we still retain those rights. And instead of doing it in PowerShell, now we're doing it in RDA Manager. For an implementation part, we looked at Certalink, who introduced us to Manage Engine at CyberSec. We had a good contact with Robin, who is our sales representative at Certalink. And then we did the implementation with Nick. He did RDA Manager and RDA Audit. I do believe that it took a couple of days to get everything up and running, especially for the customization as we talked about. But it went smoothly. If Nick had some questions, he had a direct link to Manage Engine themselves to resolve the issue. So no hiccups during the project. It was very smooth. When we need support, we take two roads. First we have Certalink, so we contact Robin and his team or we contact Nick directly. But we also tend to use the support function of the Manage Engine team itself. So we go to the Zoho website and we start in the chatbot and very quickly we get response on that, both channels of course. Sometimes it's Certalink who fixes the issue, sometimes it's Manage Engine themselves who fix the issue. But as of now, I can only speak of the tickets that we already created, they never went unanswered or issues get resolved via Manage Engine or Certalink. My experience with Manage Engine was good. Certalink and Manage Engine provided a solution for the issues that I had in the last couple of years. And it's at that point that I'm even telling other IT managers about the solutions that you guys implemented here at the Belgian Port Group. We do have a couple of groups with IT managers, 20-30 persons, and we share experiences. So the RD manager and the RD audit, both programs already came to discussion in those groups. And I'm a big believer in the Manage Engine solution, so I'm telling the others that.
