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Howard County, Maryland, Improves Organizational Efficiency with eTelemetry

The bandwidth impact of these activities caused the county's offsite backup solution to fail because the backup application was starved for bandwidth.

Howard county, Md., government is using Metron Enterprise to gain visibility into employee Internet activity that impacts the network and thereby the government's daily operations.

Howard county recognized immediate value with Metron Enterprise by using Locate to quickly identify employees even though the underlying IP and directory schemes were in flux. "Locate has proven to be invaluable as we migrate from one IP address scheme to another," said Howard County CIO Ira Levy. "It enables us to quickly identify the PCs we have missed in our conversion process and pinpoint their physical location for remediation. In the past we had to locate people based on a time-consuming, manual process. The time savings involved in rapidly identifying an employee's physical location based on their IP or MAC address makes my IT organization more efficient."

Reports enable the county to identify and solve a variety of network and behavioral issues. The county configured local update servers to provide anti-virus and Microsoft updates in order to reduce Internet bandwidth consumption.

However, Metron revealed that a number of PCs were misconfigured and were pulling updates directly from Symantec's and Microsoft's Internet sites. The bandwidth consumed by this activity represented a significant percentage of the total bandwidth available. In addition, Metron showed PCs that were streaming audio from the Internet. The bandwidth impact of these activities caused the county's offsite backup solution to fail because the backup application was starved for bandwidth. The Metron Enterprise solution made it easy to identify and pinpoint the physical location of the offending devices for remediation which quickly freed up available bandwidth for important county applications.

Additionally, Howard county leverages Metron's Gateway Anomaly Detection Dashboard to identify employees who are leaving their PCs on after-hours, a violation of policy that not only presents a security problem, but also consumes energy unnecessarily.

"The combined solution was easy to deploy and was very unobtrusive to our daily operations," commented Levy. "The eTelemetry solution solved organizational problems as well as IT-specific problems, allowing us to operate county government more efficiently for our tax-payers."