A central hospital with more than 5000 employees experienced problems with all newly deployed Unified Access Gateways (UAG). Comdivision was called in to conduct a health check on the system to identify the culprit and ensure reliable access and communication between sites. Additionally, during the on-premises deployment of Workspace ONE UEM, a number of tickets were raised with the software vendor that needed to be addressed by comdivision’s specialist because these tickets had been open for a while.
When the hospital workers’ devices cannot communicate with the internal infrastructure, this can be frustrating, or in the worst case, extremely hazardous. If patient data has been updated with crucial new information, but cannot be accessed in a timely manner, the health of the patient is at stake.
“We have capable people in our IT department for day-to-day operations,” said the head of Workplace Management, “but sometimes you hit a roadblock and need someone who is very experienced in the initial deployment and looks at it with a fresh set of eyes.”
Reinhard Partmann, comdivision’s project lead on the case, understood how crucial a quick solution was. “Obviously, as a hospital, you need redundant systems for almost any part of the IT landscape,” Partmann knew, “so this issue needed to be fixed fast! We had to approach this issue methodically during the health check and that’s why we double-checked the prerequisites, networking, sizing, and configuration of the systems involved.”
While going through the logs and tickets systematically and verifying the expected and unexpected behavior of the system, Partmann discovered that a certificate was installed on the only running system, in a custom, non-standard configuration, so the certificate wasn’t visible off-hand. The lesson learned is that only documented changes are good changes, and supported methods should be chosen instead of quick hacks.
“We reinstalled the certificate on the proper systems and documented the change, and voilà! The whole UAG setup was running again,” said Partmann.
In our after-action report, we documented all our findings and the next steps for the customer. It is crucial to document changes, especially so-called 'quick fixes', as they often are the missing piece in a bigger picture when scaling out the infrastructure.
With those changes applied, the customer is now satisfied with the new UAGs as they function as expected and are available in a redundant manner.
