In this episode of The Endpoint Zone, we talk about the proactive steps you can take to protect your infrastructure from the types of cyber attacks we’ve seen over the last couple months, we discuss the new Architecture Matters blog series, and we’re joined by Jack Madden from BrianMadden.com to talk about the changes he experts to see in enterprise mobility in 2015.

Check out this new case study from the local government of Shropshire County in England.

The county of Shropshire in central England covers over 1,200 square miles – this means that the civil employees responsible for the county are spread very thin.

Compounding this are upcoming county-wide budget reductions of $125 million over the next three years – and these budget cuts come alongside a promise of expanded government services for the citizens of Shropshire.

I know conditions like this sound familiar to a lot of IT Pros!

The county’s IT team had to get smart, productive, and really flexible. That’s where the Enterprise Mobility Suite made a huge impact.

When government buildings were closed in favor of satellite offices with Wi-Fi, government employees were armed with Office 365 and tablets/phones. With the number of tablets and phones growing, they added Intune to their SCCM deployment. When budget cuts indicated that the county’s datacenter could be closed, they moved their data to the cloud. With so many devices spread across such a massive area, the identity management from the EMS ensured that only the right data was accessed by each employee.

The case study also notes the speed of these kinds of implementations:

“Just three months after I called my technical account manager at Microsoft, we were up and running with Microsoft Intune and System Center Configuration Manager, managing 800 phones, 900 mobile devices, and 4,800 office-based PCs and laptops, all from one console,” says Wilkinson. “But the best thing about Intune was that it was our introduction to the Enterprise Mobility Suite.”

Including three cloud-based services—Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium, Intune, and Azure Rights Management—the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite fit the council’s need for user identity and access management, mobile device management, and file and data protection capabilities.

Best of all, using the Enterprise Mobility Suite is saving the county a lot of much-needed cash. The county expects EMS to save them $788k in the first year, and even more from the licensing costs for 3rd party apps they no longer need. Other cost saving measures include the reduced help desk time, reduced hardware replacement costs, and the elimination of password reset calls.

To read more about the solutions and benefits in Shropshire, you can read the case study here.

To read other EMS success stories, check out this post.

Take a minute this morning and check out a guest post from me over on the Enterprise Mobility Team blog for details about a new contest for IT Pros.

OK, so maybe contests aren’t your thing, but I bet you have a few/lots of funny (in retrospect, probably not funny at the time) stories about when everything went wrong and the IT department seemed doomed.

This contest is looking for those kinds of stories, and, to make it all worthwhile, there will be weekly prizes and a grand prize winner who walks away (digitally, at least) with a Surface Pro 3.

For more info, check out the post.

Check out this new case study from a network of hospitals in Sweden

The Jönköping County Council is a healthcare organization covering 3 hospitals and 45 care centers spread across 13 different areas. Their goal was to make their doctors and nurses as mobile and productive as possible. This meant having cloud-based identity and device management, data protection, and secure data access for phones and tablets.

The Enterprise Mobility Suite was the answer.

With EMS, a lot of traditional IT problems are solved right away; consider this quote from the case study:

Jönköping County Council didn’t want to add to its inventory of 900 servers or purchase several point products that each address only a single problem. So when the IT staff was introduced to the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite by the county council’s Microsoft account team, it saw the value of the solution’s three cloud-based services – Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium for identity management, Intune for mobile device and application management, and Azure Rights Management for information protection.

By combining SCCM with Intune, the IT team at Jönköping is more efficient than ever because they can use a single console to develop user-centric device and app management policies for their 11,000 domain-joined PCs and for the mobile devices used by doctors and nurses in the field. Previously they had used a different EMM tool and it was “frustrating to switch between two tools” to manage all the devices their users want to use.

Now, a doctor can review all of the information gathered about a patient treated in a distant clinic from any location on his tablet or phone. This leads to streamlined care for the patient and reduced time and costs for the hospital.

To read more about the solutions and benefits at Jönköping, you can read the full case study here.

To read other EMS success stories, check out this post.