A2U, an IGEL Platinum Partner, recently experienced a situation where one of its large, regional healthcare clients was hit by a cyberattack. “Essentially, malware entered the client’s network via a computer and began replicating like wildfire,” recalls A2U Vice President of Sales, Robert Hammond.

During the cyberattack, a few hundred of the hospital’s PCs were affected. Among those were 30 endpoints within the finance department that the healthcare organization deemed mission critical due to the volume of daily transactions between patients, insurance companies, and state and county agencies for services rendered. “It was very painful from a business standpoint not to be able to conduct billing and receiving, not to mention payroll,” said Hammond.

Prior to this particular incident, A2U had received demo units of the IGEL UD Pocket, a revolutionary micro endpoint that can transform x86-compatible PCs and laptops into IGEL OS powered desktops. “We had been having a discussion with this client about re-imaging their PCs, but their primary concern was maintaining the integrity of the data that was already on the hardware,” continued Hammond. “HIPAA and other regulations meant that they needed to preserve the data and keep it secure, and we thought that the IGEL UD Pocket could be the answer to this problem. We didn’t see why it wouldn’t work, but we needed to test our theory.”

When the malware attack hit, that opportunity came sooner, rather than later for A2U. “We plugged the UD Pocket into one of the affected machines and were able to bypass the local hard drive, installing the Linux-based IGEL OS on the system without impacting existing data,” said Hammond. “It was like we had created a ‘Linux bubble’ that protected the machine, yet created an environment that allowed end users to quickly return to productivity.”

Working with the hospital’s IT team, it only took a few hours for A2U to get the entire finance department back online. “They were able to start billing the very next day,” added Hammond.

The news of the success with the IGEL UD Pocket made it all the way up to the hospital’s COO. As a result of the time-to-value experienced by the healthcare organization, quick return to productivity, and ability to maintain the data integrity of the hardware – the client decided to standardize all of its endpoints on Linux.

To achieve this goal, the hospital is currently leveraging the IGEL UD Pocket and the IGEL Universal Desktop Converter (UDC), a software-defined solution that converts x86-compatible PCs, laptops and mobile devices into IGEL OS-powered desktops. “They have a mixed environment of VDI and hosted, shared desktops and use Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop to deliver applications and desktops to their end users,” said Hammond. “And, because IGEL and Citrix work very well together, the combination of the Linux-based IGEL OS and Citrix VDI makes a lot of sense for them.”

“And, because IGEL and Citrix work very well together, the combination of the Linux-based IGEL OS and Citrix VDI makes a lot of sense for them.”