About Covenant Health

Covenant Health is an innovative, Catholic regional health delivery network and a leader in values-based, not-for-profit health and elder care. Covenant consists of hospitals, skilled nursing and rehabilitation centers, assisted living residences, and community-based health and elder care organizations. Covenant Health is a sponsor of 15 hospital and post-acute care (PAC) organizations located in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, and it also serves as the Sponsor of a Foundation in Vermont.

Challenge

Covenant Health had structured information that was stored in various spreadsheets, custom databases and web applications. Their “sources of truth” needed improvement in terms of organization, quality, and accuracy to enable them to have good information that provided value and decision support from it.

“We were keeping the list of servers in a very cumbersome spreadsheet, said Adam Sherwood, Enterprise Infrastructure Architect for Covenant Health. “We were hand-maintaining the list of subnets and IP address assignments in two separate systems, neither of which met all our needs. The application and support escalation inventories were in a very good, custom system that was showing its age. For some important metadata, we had no agreed-upon, useful source of truth, including departments and end user device assignments.”

“We get a termination report of people who change roles or who have left the organization. Because of the lifecycle history that we have built, we can process those names through Device42 in a matter of seconds and have a list of IT assets assigned to that person,” explained Sherwood. “Before Device42, it was really just trusting people who were about to leave the organization to bring back what they had.”

Improving Their Source of Truth

Sherwood determined the most critical capability needed from the solution that he chose was discovery and management of information automated or a solution where data could be federated by automation.

Other important requirements were for an import/export feature, and a REST API, again, all oriented around automating discovery and data maintenance. After test driving Device42, it was clear that it met Covenant Health’s requirements and then some.

“Device42 met all my requirements,” said Sherwood. “It was robust, feature complete, had an entry cost that was fit for our scale and budget, and it was ready to use, so our time to value was very low. We’re very happy customers.”

The Value Covenant Health Gains from Device42

Asset Management

When people change jobs within a company or leave, understanding what equipment has been provided to them was a day-long task before Device42.

“We get a termination report of people who change roles or who have left the organization. Because of the lifecycle history that we have built, we can process those names through Device42 in a matter of seconds and have a list of IT assets assigned to that person,” explained Sherwood. “Before Device42, it was really just trusting people who were about to leave the organization to bring back what they had.”

Robust and Flexible Data Model

It was critical that the set of CI (configuration item) types, properties, and relationships in the data model was comprehensive out-of-the-box so that Covenant Health didn’t need to make significant changes to the model before getting value from it.

“Device42 Discovery has a robust and flexible data model, which was a key decision criteria. The fact that we can add custom fields when needed, which I try to use sparingly, but having that flexibility with an already robust data model is key,” Sherwood commented.

Foundation for Business Continuity/ Disaster Recovery Planning

Application inventory is the foundation of Covenant Health’s business continuity and disaster recovery planning. They have saved time and reduced errors in terms of not needing to handenter the servers and application components that compose a Business Application.

“Business Applications in Device42 have many key properties and relationships that I need for my application inventory, including recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and criticality. The criticality property maps nicely to my categorization of services into business continuity tiers. That was a perfect fit for our needs,” Sherwood said.

Extended Capabilities

Device42’s core license provides functionality that is often considered a standalone application, including Infrastructure and Infrastructure-As-A-Service (Iaas) Discovery, Auto-Populating Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) capabilities, IT Asset Management (ITAM) documentation capabilities, IP Asset Management (IPAM), and Enterprise IT Password Management. Device42 also offers modules for software license management, storage discovery, and application dependency mapping.

Device42 API

“We get a ton of mileage out of the Device42 API. It is the business glue that lets us federate data.” Sherwood continued, “Now I have this very usable, flexible, importable, exportable, queryable by the API data that is the source of truth.

Customer Obsessed

“Your tech support organization is the best that I work with. There isn’t anyone who is better. They are very responsive. I don’t get the runaround. I don’t wait hours or days for an endless escalation change. When I make a feature request, it is tied to a ticket and there is a follow up. The response is always from someone who seems interested, engaged, and has skin in the game,” remarked Sherwood.