St. Andrew’s College Tracks IT Assets, Recovers Stolen Computers and Boosts Morale

Founded in 1899, St. Andrew’s College is one of Canada’s only remaining all-boys boarding and day schools. The school of approximately 550 boys and 60 faculty is situated in Aurora, part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). With each student and teacher issued a new Dell wireless laptop every two years, and the machines in constant use in the classroom, on field trips, in the boarding houses and at home, the Information Technology department of St. Andrew’s was entrusted with managing and protecting the leased fleet.

Steve Rush, Director of IT at St. Andrew’s, recommended Computrace Complete in the Spring of 2005 to manage and protect the school’s fleet of over 600 laptops.

“Before we made the investment in laptop tracking and recovery software, we performed a cost-benefit analysis,” recalls Rush. “We found that while the $1000 recovery guarantee is attractive, ComputraceComplete helps in ways that we had not anticipated. For one, the impact on school morale when a laptop walks out the door is just terrible. Everyone becomes a suspect – students, janitorial staff, guests to the school – and so school morale suffers. But when a laptop went missing last November, we knew it would call in and that the police would find the thief, thanks to Computrace Complete. In my mind, the software pays for itself right there – and you cannot quantify ‘school morale’ in a cost-benefit analysis.”

“I like ComputraceComplete for three main reasons,” says Rush. “One, the theft deterrent factor; two, the impact on school morale when a laptop disappears; and three, the value of Secure Asset Tracking reports.

“While we don’t advertise the fact that we’re using laptop tracking and recovery software to the boys, we are not keeping it a secret either. Without revealing how we are doing it, the word is out that we can track laptops. And now that the persistent agent has proven itself to be working so reliably, I have no reservations about the boys knowing. So with the technology-savvy students, this now serves as a significant deterrent. For those who are unaware of Computrace Complete who just seize an opportunity to steal, we’ll catch them. We are very confident of this.”

When one of the St. Andrew’s students left his laptop unattended in a campus laundry room in November 2005, the unit was stolen in a matter of minutes. The student reported the theft to the IT department, who contacted the Absolute Software Recovery Team. The laptop was detected on the Internet later that day by the Recovery Team, who relayed the user and location information to Rush’s IT team the very day it was stolen. The machine changed location a few times, but eventually it settled down to one IP and one location.

“To me, even more important than the $1000 recovery guarantee is the fact that we could immediately inform the Headmaster, the teachers and anyone involved with the incident that we were tracking the laptop and would eventually find the perpetrator,” said Rush. “In fact, the police recovered the laptop and dropped it off at the school just last week.”

The IT team at St. Andrew’s also uses Computrace Complete for asset management, such as verifying configurations on remote PCs, checking hard drive usage and identifying unauthorized software. They also use it to monitor the rollout of Windows Updates to ensure important patches and fixes are installed in a timely manner.

Rush explains: “There are security holes in Windows, and there are lots of malware and worms out there that exploit these vulnerabilities and have brought our wireless network to a crawl. And so it’s critical to run Windows Updates on an as-needed basis. Out of respect for our users, we initially tried a voluntary procedure: when we wanted everyone to run Windows Updates, we sent out an email to our 600 students and teachers and told them to please run these patches and fixes. After the first day, we saw that 92 laptops had the updates; after two days it was up to 180; after three days, double that. But it took an entire month for all 600 computers to be updated. Meanwhile, our whole network is vulnerable when even one laptop is running unprotected.

“Armed with the Computrace Complete data, we decided to change our approach and implemented a policy to automatically install the updates the next time each individual laptop started up. Again, we were able to monitor this approach and we saw that this time around, it took 2 days for every laptop to install the Windows Update, instead of a month. Being able to see the actual configuration of any machine in service makes for a great planning tool.”

Rush also uses the reports in ComputraceComplete to monitor that hardware and software installed on the laptops are meeting the needs of users.

“With our lease agreement with Dell, everyone gets a new laptop every two years. When we refresh the fleet, we need to know if requirements are being met. For example, we assumed at first that the 40GB hard drives in the current machines were going to be fine the next time around. But once we took a look at the asset tracking reports from Computrace Complete, we discovered that many of the boys really needed 60GB, and so we specified that in our next lease agreement.”

Although Rush appreciates the comprehensive benefits provided by the software, he also notes that the Computrace agent in the BIOS is so streamlined that it is negligible in terms of loading time.

“We didn’t want a laptop security application that added considerably to the startup, and Computrace Complete loads imperceptibly to the end-user. We are extremely satisfied with this product.”