NoMachine NX provides health care industry with remote access solution that meets HIPAA requirements.

About the Organization

Mosaic is a non-profit US charity organization serving more than 3,500 adults and children with development disabilities in approximately 250 communities across the United States. In addition to 5,000 employees at 40 agencies in 14 states, Mosaic has also established partner programs in several foreign countries.

The Challenge

Migrating from a Windows environment to Linux, Mosaic needed to maintain client-side functionality and processing power to allow employees to work offline and still have access to locally-installed functionalities such as Firefox and Open Office for creating basic documents. Sound and video were also needed for training CDs and other forms of media. These "high-function" thin clients would be dependent on a central server for all job-related data processing activities, such as running corporate CRM. The majority of all work would be performed on the central terminal servers with all documents stored and edited there. Mosaic, therefore, needed a server-based application delivery solution which was user-friendly and allowed Mosaic to keep their expenditure to a minimum. In addition, they needed a solution that would meet the privacy standards of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and run off their existing legacy systems, requiring no additional hardware purchases.

The Solution

Mosaic decided to adopt Linux as their host operating system instead of Windows and NoMachine NX as their remote access solution, because of the dramatic cost-savings, improved performance and enhanced security. NX helped to drastically reduce expenditures for Mosaic, with low overall cost and allowing for the re-utilization of their old PC's to run as their “high-function” thin client terminals.

"There really is no comparison to be made to other solutions, as the cost of NX in terms of the overall IT expenditure is almost negligible," says data storage and security administrator for the Mosaic National Office, Thomas Keown.

Besides reducing costs, NX improves performance, requiring very little bandwidth per user connection translating into effective speed for each remote session. This feature of NX also allows for a large number of concurrent users from each facility without affecting local network connectivity.

While Mosaic originally chose NoMachine NX Enterprise Server to provide remote access services for their employees, they've since decided to upgrade to NX Advanced Server and NX Advanced Server Nodes to support their growing use of NX. NX Advanced Server, once implemented, will allow Mosaic to automatically reroute users to servers configured by the system administrator, balancing the computing load among all available nodes. This load balancing, or ability to distribute the server work load among different nodes, has the potential to increase session resiliency, server response time, and resource utilization. Mosaic will use the NX Advanced Server Nodes to efficiently load-balance their ever-increasing sessions, adding further nodes as needed.

NX Advanced Server allows Mosaic to automatically reroute users to servers configured by the system administrator, balancing their ever-increasing sessions among all available nodes and adding nodes as needed. This increases session resiliency, server response time, and resource utilization.

Security is a major priority in the health care industry and NX allows Mosaic to meet all HIPAA requirements. With NX, data traffic between the client and server is tunneled through a secure SSH channel. Providing guaranteed security at every level of the communication process, NX ensures the privacy of health information across any network.

Results

Taking over four years to complete the entire migration, NX made the process easier and was implemented in the last remote agency located in Connecticut in November 2009. A month later, Mosaic completed the migration of all 40 offices throughout the country to the new NX solution, finishing with the headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Since completion of this project, there have been approximately 1,500 total users and nearly 500 concurrent users at any given time.

Feedback from NX users at Mosaic has been overwhelmingly positive as they realize the true power of collaboration and the convenience of having ready access to their data from anywhere. Even as staff travel to international destinations, they can still connect to the system and access the central NX Server cluster instantly.

"The NoMachine Client and Server implementations have been key to our project success," said Keown. "With NX, we have centralized our massive amount of data and are now provided the control, back-up and security we require to meet HIPAA requirements. The costs are relatively minimal, but more importantly, NX technology has worked flawlessly from the beginning."

About NoMachine Advanced Server Products

The NoMachine Advanced products create a cluster of nodes federated in a single NX server. It allows corporations to implement massive desktop consolidation strategies by automatically routing the user to the server configured by the system administrator and by balancing the computing load among all the available nodes.

NX security is guaranteed at every layer involved in the communication process. NX uses SSH public-key encryption and 128 bit volatile random cookie generation.