The Port of Newcastle sails through IT shipwrecks with ManageEngine’s offerings

Proficient change management

Outstanding customer support

Smooth cloud adoption

About the business

The Port of Newcastle, proudly crowned as Australia’s deep-water global getaway, envisions building the country’s prosperity through integrated and innovative supply chain solutions. The Port of Newcastle successfully contributes enormous shipping movements and cargo operations worth about $48 billion every year to the nation’s economy. Emphasis is placed on building a safe workplace that supports the mental health of the people working at the port. The port’s management also continuously diversifies trade opportunities to create a sustainable environment.

Migrating to the cloud has become integral in right-sizing resources to build an organisation. Whether from an IT perspective or from a strategic standpoint, this upgrade keeps an organisation focused on generating maximum efficiency.

The Port of Newcastle took the lead on cloud adoption even before this concept became the buzzword during the global health crisis of 2020. Digitisation of the port had already been in the works for over three years before the pandemic. When the port’s IT team started looking for opportunities, ManageEngine solutions extended positive support to spice up the port’s cybersecurity side.

The Port of Newcastle

INDUSTRY

International trade and

development

HEADQUARTERS

Newcastle,

New South Wales

YEARS IN THE BUSINESS

10 Years

EMPLOYEES

51-200 employees

PRODUCTS IN FOCUS

ADManager Plus

OpManager

Endpoint Central

Mobile Device Manager Plus

Strengthening identity and access management with ADManager Plus

The first ManageEngine product shipped to the Port of Newcastle’s IT infrastructure was ADManager Plus, which handles identity and access management (IAM) for Active Directory (AD). Since the port constantly seeks diversified trade opportunities, the organisation has internal structural changes and significant changes to employee roles that happen from time to time. Marty McNab, the IT manager, explains that these changes incur changes in AD that must be kept on top of.

Marty McNab

IT manager, Port of Newcastle

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marty-mcnerp
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Onboarding ADManager Plus into their IT strategy has helped the organisation reap the benefits of standardised user identity lifecycle management. The use of readily-available customisable templates that contain standard user attribute values help implement bulk user management. Thus, the port’s IT team witnessed the concrete results of bringing in multiple users at a time, their creation, modification, and deletion of multiple AD objects—all from a single console.

Simplifying change management with ServiceDesk Plus

When the focus is on customers, their needs become an organisation’s priority. Keeping this in mind, the port’s IT team landed upon ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus to utilize the product’s high capability to assist with overall IT service delivery. Of all the features of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Marty McNab says that the most commendable one had to be change management.

With the change management feature, the IT team has accommodated sophisticated updates and patch management relative to servers. This feature explicitly allows the configuration of automated workflows, in addition to triggering notifications for business stakeholders. A clear map throughout the process helps the IT admins be aware of associated risks and reduces the scope of unplanned outages disrupting the business routine.

“The workflows in there have enabled us to communicate well with any servers that will have downtime, to have approvals from people who are responsible for the servers, and then, ultimately, just have an audit trail of changes that have been made, as well as ensuring we have those rollback plans in place if things go wrong.”

- Marty McNab

IT manager, Port of Newcastle

“To be very frank, the implementation of ServiceDesk Plus was very quick, and it was easy to deploy in our infrastructure. Within two to three training sessions, our technicians understood the product’s working mechanism, and we did not face any difficulties during implementation.”

- Marty McNab

IT manager, Port of Newcastle

Fighting off endpoint uncertainties with Endpoint Central

The IT team had reported issues regarding failed Windows server update services to the endpoints, denied group policies deployment, and a crucial need to monitor the system’s remote network. Endpoint security and management is now perpetual rather than a seasonal check. The Port of Newcastle’s IT team claims to have witnessed the ante and post phases of implementing ManageEngine Endpoint Central.

Adopting ManageEngine Endpoint Central really did ramp up the IT team’s ability to manage and secure an estimated 250 endpoints, composed of laptops, servers, and mobile devices managed through the mobile device management (MDM) feature.

From the security side, the IT admins use the BitLocker encryption feature to protect data at any time of uncertainty. Marty McNab states that transitioning to ManageEngine was smooth, owing to the brand’s recognisability and consistent good remarks.

Dynamic network component observability with OpManager

Having spoken about all the other ManageEngine products in use, McNab also adds a word about his experience with OpManager. OpManager is highly focused on monitoring and analysing the health of an entire IT infrastructure, including the tiniest component in the environment.

Like every other business, remote work also had its way of impacting the port. With about 250 endpoints in place, OpManager helps to identify the root cause of any incident and fixes it before it impacts other operations. Thus, the team maximised the benefit of monitoring devices even more thanks to the ease provided by OpManager’s mobile application. The app lists out which devices are inactive or down, and sends timely alarms based on the incident severity—and does it all from a single consolidated view.

- Marty McNab

IT manager, Port of Newcastle

The IT manager, Marty McNab, went on to say that from a broader perspective, the installation, price quotient, and support have remained the same since the port first starting using ManageEngine products, starting with ADManager in 2016. The turnaround time for any issue the IT team has encountered has always been less than 24 hours, and for any high-severity incident, the ManageEngine support team has always had their back.

About ManageEngine

ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation that offers comprehensive on-premises and cloud-native IT and security operations management solutions for global organizations and managed service providers. Established and emerging enterprises—including nine of every 10 Fortune 100 organizations—rely on ManageEngine’s real-time IT management tools to ensure the optimal performance of their IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, endpoints and more. ManageEngine has 18 data centers, 20 offices and 200+ channel partners worldwide to help organizations tightly align their business to IT.

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The Port of Newcastle sails through IT shipwrecks with ManageEngine’s​offerings

About the business

The Port of Newcastle

Strengthening identity and access management with ADManager Plus

Marty McNab

Simplifying change management with ServiceDesk Plus

- Marty McNab

- Marty McNab

Fighting off endpoint uncertainties with Endpoint Central

Dynamic network component observability with OpManager

- Marty McNab

About ManageEngine

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The Port of Newcastle sails through IT shipwrecks with ManageEngine’s
offerings