CASE STUDY Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Leverages GoToMyPC Corporate for Security, Ease of Use, and Business Continuity

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1 CASE STUDY Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Leverages GoToMyPC Corporate for Security, Ease of Use, and Business Continuity Sponsored by: Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems Inc. Stephen D. Drake November 2006 Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F INTRODUCTION This IDC study is the result of a consulting project in which IDC was commissioned to look at emerging mobility and IT challenges in the U.S. enterprise. This case study involved open-ended interviews with business and technical decision makers and, as applicable, actual end users of the technology. Respondents were chosen from a list provided to IDC by Citrix Online (a division of Citrix Systems Inc.). STATE AGENCY BACKGROUND The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) is charged with protecting children and adults who are elderly or have disabilities living at home or in state facilities, and licensing group day care homes, day care centers, and registered family homes. The agency is also responsible for managing community-based programs that prevent delinquency, abuse, neglect, and exploitation of Texas children, elderly, and disabled adults. The agency's services are provided through its Adult Protective Services, Child Protective Services, Child Care Licensing, and Prevention and Early Intervention divisions. Everyday, 9,000 DFPS employees in 254 cities across the state of Texas protect the physical safety and emotional well-being of its most vulnerable citizens. Among its 9,000 employees are investigators, caseworkers, and field personnel involved in these programs, and a significant number of support staff who work in a call center, administer new investigations, and provide technical support. As an example of the number of cases and investigations, in 2004, the Adult Protective Services component of the agency completed 61,000 investigations of which nearly three-quarters were confirmed cases of maltreatment. Scope and Challenge IT Scope The core function of the agency stems from the daily activities for child and adult protective investigations and the licensing of day care centers. The IT operations unit that supports this group includes the following:! High-availability datacenter! Regional centers with 62 staff members representing more than 250 cities

2 ! Responsibilities include PC imaging, asset management, new application deployment, security, capacity planning, front-line support, and support of PCs, servers and network! Telecom responsibilities include a 24 x 7 call center staffed by 300 employees who record calls, open cases, and dispatch assignments to field workers! Support of the field worker that uses a tablet PC, digital camera, and a wireless frame relay network In addition, the application, development, and maintenance unit of the IT organization designs and implements custom software applications that are hosted on a central server. The State of Texas DFPS has more than 3,000 child protective workers and an investigative staff that are the first responders to calls coming into the call center. Once a call center representative has received a call about a report of abuse, neglect, or exploitation, caseworkers are required to initiate an investigation within 24 hours. The agency also has about 1,000 child day care licensing agents across the state that are required to ensure that the day care centers are operating safely, securely and have the proper licensing. For this and other large field-force components, DFPS has an equally critical support staff that includes a set of managers and supervisors, legal personnel working on contracts, and teleworkers (typically data entry employees) who exclusively work from home. IT Challenge The challenge facing DFPS was how to provide access to multiple applications including finance, office applications, , intranet access, and other proprietary back ends for their broad worker set. These workers had different access needs, device choices, connectivity options, location challenges all under extreme security concerns, where privacy and child/family security were of utmost importance. The company set up a number of criteria in order to give this worker set access:! Ease of use. These employees were typically very busy, whether it was an upper management executive, a data-entry person working from home with a large case load, or a call center representative fielding calls. The solution had to be simple, without a lot of training required.! No maintenance. The IT staff would be in charge of supporting and maintaining whatever remote access offering was put into place, and it was critical that this was equally simple for those administering the solution.! Low cost. Although important returns were expected, typical state budgets in the past several years had been tight, and there was not a significant budget to support a large-scale remote access VPN solution (as a VPN in limited use was already in place). 2 # IDC

3 ! Security. Despite the low-cost criterion, such a solution would not be used unless there was demonstration that this offering was as secure as a VPN solution. To date, the agency had some workers leveraging a VPN, however, it went against most of the criteria above, including being too high maintenance, not easy to use, and cost prohibitive. Citrix Online Solution DFPS looked at several solutions, including traditional remote control offerings and other client/server solutions, and sought a Web-based service. The agency first began looking at Citrix GoToMyPC Corporate in As a department of a state, DFPS was required to go through stringent testing as it related to, for example, security and scalability and make the GoToMyPC service interoperable across other state agencies. The department received approval from the state with assistance from other state agencies that were convinced that GoToMyPC Corporate was a viable solution. As an example, the security officer for the state's lottery agency was skeptical of the offering's security features, but after demonstrations and discussions with DFPS, the officer was satisfied with the strength of its security. It is important to note that both the DFPS and the lottery agency are not casual observers of security but deal with records with security requirements equivalent to those found in law enforcement or the medical industries. In fact, as an early user of GoToMyPC Corporate, DFPS helped steer the product to reach the stringent level of security required by the agency five years ago. DFPS started small, but in the resulting years, the state provided access for up to 2,500 users and is currently past 3,000 users with a waiting list on the user side of 300 employees. The department is now analyzing the future growth of the GoToMyPC Corporate service. Benefits Realized After using GoToMyPC Corporate for five years, DFPS included a number of significant returns such as:! Better management of the workday. Highly mobile employees in these positions found themselves able to go home at a reasonable hour, attend to personal matters, and then, if necessary, could log in to the office through GoToMyPC Corporate to get complete control of the desktop and important access to other enterprise resources.! People satisfaction. Employee satisfaction increased as workers were able to be flexible in accessing corporate resources and did not need to go back into the office. The solution allowed the agency to employ back-up call center employees to work from home in the event of a spike of calls. Such an arrangement allowed employees to quickly get online without the need to go into a call center. In general, GoToMyPC Corporate was also simple to use no training required and just a one-page tip sheet was given to employees IDC #

4 ! Strong usage. DFPS had very high usage reports, upwards of 85% for all licenses purchased. Since there was a waiting list for others to get licenses, the remaining 15% that did not use the service were told to use the license or it would be transferred to an awaiting employee. This transfer of licenses was a simple process. In addition, 80% of those who used GoToMyPC Corporate used it at least three times a week and at an average of two hours per session.! Adoption across other state agencies. With the success and continued strong usage within DFPS, the department won an award for deploying this initiative, and as a result, additional state agencies began to adopt the solution, recognizing the value in other use cases.! Enhanced communication. State agency employees are often required to meet together and react to specific emergency situations or work odd hours due to legislative activity. GoToMyPC Corporate allowed workers to enter into ad-hoc meetings collaboratively and access key documents, greatly improving communication across multiple team members. Future Plans Business Continuity Flexible Licensing Provides Ease in Change of Model DFPS has plans to expand to a workforce of 10,500 by the end of Due to changes in the business model for child protective and adult protective caseworkers, the group will be shifting to a more mobile tablet PC-based technology. With the ease of administration of GoToMyPC Corporate licenses, DFPS will be able to shift the 1,100 licenses used by this group to other areas that can use them for such emergencies as temporary increases in workload that require immediate responses from remote locations. Leveraging GoToMyPC Corporate for Disaster Response In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005, DFPS realized a new use as it relates to business continuity. Texas was both a victim and major response state. Cities such as Galveston, Beaumont, and Tyler had employees that did not go into their office for over a month due to the storm. While the office equipment was still functional, employees could not get into the building and several hundred employees used GoToMyPC Corporate from home to continue working. In some instances, employees from those areas did not have GoToMyPC Corporate a technician easily installed this on their machines and got the employee up and running quickly. In addition, DFPS was able to set up virtual call centers where employees could access a bank of 50 PCs and get access to the resources required to keep the vital 24 x 7 call center up and running. In Houston, where thousands of devastated Hurricane Katrina victims from Louisiana and Mississippi sought shelter, many DFPS employees leveraged GoToMyPC Corporate to help reunite separated foster children by accessing a database within its network through a secured Internet connection. Additionally, day care centers were set up across some of the major shelter areas in Houston, and DFPS used GoToMyPC Corporate to inspect those childcare centers to ensure their safety. At the 4 # IDC

5 same time, the agency was involved with keeping track of lost children, removing predators who may have been inadvertently housed next to children in those shelters, and assisting aging or mentally challenged adults. GoToMyPC Corporate was used to get at the critical resources and applications used for case documentation, accessing critical databases and applications for these functions and for childcare licensing. This scenario provides a glimpse into the future use of GoToMyPC Corporate for business continuity at DFPS. Just as DFPS deployed GoToMyPC Corporate as a model for improved employee access five years ago that spawned increased adoption of this service across several state agencies within Texas, so is the use of GoToMyPC Corporate a new path as a contingency plan for many employees required to provide assistance in the event of a natural disaster or other catastrophic events. The use of the service points to the future of leveraging GoToMyPC Corporate as a viable business continuity plan, and DFPS continues to work with Citrix Online on making the pricing and the service available in increments that are feasible in the event of a disaster. Such a model speaks to the potential for remote access services to be leveraged. Copyright Notice External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2006 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden IDC #