Jamf Blog
Enabling BYOD and COPE with Casper Suite

Enabling BYOD and COPE with Casper Suite

In today's JNUC session, Vincent Bippus of CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—gave an overview of the IT models they implemented to provide employees with academic and personal freedom. 

As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Corporate-Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) programs become more common in organizations, it's important to have the right tools and policies in place to ensure these programs succeed.

In today's JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC) session, Vincent Bippus of CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—gave an overview of the models they implemented to provide employees with academic and personal freedom. 

Obviously, CERN spends the majority of their time trying to solve the larger mysteries of the universe with their Large Hydron Collider in Geneva, but they also conduct a lot of medical research, including Positron Emission Tomography and Hadron therapy for cancer treatment. In addition, education plays a huge part in their organization with schools, student, and teacher programs.

In 2014, they created a LOT of data. 100PB archive with additional 27PB/year, 11,000 physical servers, 7,500 disk drives and 45,000 tapes. Data needs to be kept for at least 20 years. And that’s nothing compared to 2015, when they turned the Hadron Collider back on, so they’re expecting a significant increase in data rate.

Working at CERN, there are approximately 2,300 staff, and their estate currently consists of 8,000+ Windows PCs and 2,900+ Macs, so that means they have the typical office needs that many other organizations will be able to identify with.

After testing several solutions, they decided that Self Service was a great way to proceed in order to empower their users, giving them easy access to recommended application and configurations, and it made the support team’s jobs easier too. It’s available for both personal and corporate-owned Macs, and software access is based on LDAP groups.

Finally, Self Service is also how they solve the problem of 1,000+ printers, spread over 842 rooms, distributed in 228 buildings. These printers are often moved from room to room — just to make it extra interesting. To help users find their nearest printer, they have implemented geo-location based on client IP. They get a list of printers from the current printing service database through a web service. Self Service enables users to install the correct drivers on their own.

As Bippus puts it, “It’s like managing a small town.”

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