Outsourcing is becoming the most frequent method of administration of information technologies in corporate environment. The pace of development of information technologies is so high that there is no chance that users who need to concentrate on their core business tasks could administrate their IT processes professionally. The companies who were the first to realize this fact, initiated the emergence of outsourcing and transferred responsibility for correct operations of IT to specialized companies. The research done by InformationWeek Research shows that almost two thirds of companies who transferred the administration of their information systems to external companies did it to reduce their IT operation costs.

Bittner Print has been established in 1991 with the aim of building an express service with high standards of approach to customers independently of their size. This philosophy brought faithful customers and a leading position among providers of digital print services and reprography. Newest technologies, qualified experts and quality service makes Bittner Print one of the largest players at the European digital print market.

Viruses Need to Be Fought

If you connect to the Internet using an unprotected computer, you will be attacked within several minutes. According to estimates of McAffee Avert Labs, more than 217 000 types of currently known security risks exist for the year 2007. Despite this fact, many users still underestimate the risk. Here, professional IT companies can not be substituted.

The cooperation of Bittner Print and Gratex International started in the virus fighting arena. The company first attempted to protect their computers on their own. “After fruitless attempts to remove viruses, we realized that we need antivirus professionals to help us. We decided to ask Gratex International to cooperate,” said Monika Benediktová, executive of Bittner Print.

“We were contacted with a request to remove viruses from computers and to provide for complete protection against other attacks from external environment. In the past, viruses once completely paralyzed the company,” said Peter Záhradník, Gratex system engineer. “Then, the company was completely cut off from the outside world and unable to fulfill agreed orders.” To eliminate this risk, Gratex introduced a portfolio of several security products in the company – antivirus, antispam and a firewall. The corporate network is protected by a Microsoft ISA server, operating in proxy mode, currently analyzing all ongoing communication and identifying viruses already at the entry level, preventing infection from spreading all around the system.

Safe Mobile Access

Soon after, Bittner Print decided to entrust the operation of their entire information system to Gratex. The main reason to transfer to complete IT outsourcing was in the extraordinarily positive results of the security project. Gratex has changed the IT infrastructure of the company from the very basis. Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems technologies and Microsoft, Corel and Adobe software were supplied. Apart from normal customers, Bittner Print also serves graphic studios who traditionally work in Macintosh environment. The project respected the existence of both workstation platforms – Macintosh and PC, using the Windows Server 2003 platform.

The changes also included migration of the corporate e-mail system to Exchange Mail Server. “For the management and external workers, we have created safe mobile access using technologies such as RPC over HTTPs and Outlook Mobile Access,” said Peter Záhradník from Gratex.

Legality of the Software Used

With 70 PC users, maintaining legal clarity of installed software is a demanding task in any company. As Monika Benediktová, executive of the company, said: “As the aim of Bittner Print is to be a company adhering to business ethics rules, inspections of legality of used software needed to be introduced. We were therefore pleased when Gratex offered regular software audits.”

The task of the software audit is to identify the efficiency of use of software in the company. The task of software management is then to prevent from using illegal software and to save funds when purchasing software licenses. In Bittner Print, removing unnecessary software and preventing from unrestrained installations brought not only higher security level of the information system but also better use of work time. After presenting evident benefits of this approach, Gratex has been performing audit of licenses in Bittner Print each year.

Benefits for the Customer

• Bittner Print substantially increased the security of its information systems.
• Using outsourcing, the costs of IT administration were decreased despite simultaneous existence of workstation platforms.
• The new IT structure in the company is more reliable and resistant against failures.
• Data is located on servers; for all workstations, user restrictions were defined to that each user can only start applications permitted for them.
• Active administration of software licenses, together with regular inspection of installed software, provides the basis for ensuring “software clarity” of computers owned by the company.

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