Challenge
Using a home-grown interface to support lab provisioning was difficult to maintain, and confusing for learners, including customers and external partners. Facing strong organic growth and rising demand for courses, BeyondTrust knew they needed a more powerful, efficient, and easy-to-use virtual labs solution.
Solution
With Skytap Virtual IT Labs, BeyondTrust is able to save time by automating the provisioning of virtual labs, integrate seamlessly with its LMS, and deliver strong connection speeds to better serve students. Today, the Skytap solution effectively and efficiently supports hundreds of BeyondTrust’s virtual classes.
About BeyondTrust
BeyondTrust is the worldwide leader in intelligent identity and access security, empowering organizations to protect identities, stop threats, and deliver dynamic access to empower and secure a work-from-anywhere world. Our integrated products and platform offer the industry’s most advanced privileged access management (PAM) solution, enabling organizations to quickly shrink their attack surface across traditional, cloud and hybrid environments. BeyondTrust University helps customers and partners to rapidly learn about BeyondTrust products and to experience a live automation environment.
BeyondTrust’s Challenge
BeyondTrust University offers a variety of training courses in numerous formats including virtual, onsite, live, and on-demand to help customers understand BeyondTrust products and principles related to privileged remote access. Prior to Skytap, BeyondTrust was using a home-grown interface to support learners. However, the system was difficult to maintain and update, and was confusing for learners to use for both internal and external labs. Facing strong organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, and global expansion, BeyondTrust needed a virtual labs solution that could keep pace with its growth, better support its learners, integrate with a learning management system (LMS) and make it easy for the internal team to support. In addition to the growing number of labs, BeyondTrust also had the need for strong performance since latency was an issue with delivering labs to learners across the globe.
Skytap Solution
In considering a solution, BeyondTrust selected Skytap Virtual IT Labs due to the following product features and capabilities:
- Scalability and usability
- On-demand delivery and latency
- Easy instructor access and controls
- Global availability and geographical locations of datacenters
- Ability to quickly provision environments
- Ability to use the API to automate provisioning
- Ability to integrate with its LMS
Skytap’s Course Manager solution, an add-on of the Skytap Virtual IT Labs offering, was appealing because it supports different class types, rather than a demonstration environment for a single client. Additionally, BeyondTrust wanted the ability to re-use templates for classes rather than setting up the environment each time.
With Skytap, BeyondTrust utilized the Course Manager API to automate the provisioning of labs for each learner, which saves the team invaluable time as they were previously manually provisioning each course. BeyondTrust has also integrated Skytap with its LMS, Intellum, to deliver a seamless learning experience. Learners log into Intellum and there is a custom Skytap link for each course embedded in the interface. Each lab is configured to automatically provision a few minutes before the start time of the course or each time a learner selects an on-demand class.
Outcomes
BeyondTrust University utilizes Skytap Virtual IT Labs to support 200 to 300 labs per month. In the last two years, BeyondTrust has seen a 40% increase in labs for customer training and a 30% increase in labs for partners. With this increase in growth, BeyondTrust saves time by automating the provisioning of labs. Before the automation, it took the team around 10 minutes to provision each lab. With at least 200 labs per month, the team saves 2,000 minutes per month through automated provisioning with the API. “The time saved with the automation is astronomical and it minimizes errors at the same time,” notes Sandra Hanna, Senior Vice President, Education and Enablement at BeyondTrust.
By using Skytap, BeyondTrust is able to:
- Save 2,000 minutes per month through automated provisioning
- Eliminate human error in provisioning through automation
- Integrate its LMS API with Skytap to improve the user experience
- Include Skytap lab monitoring results in its Education Services Dashboard for strong reporting
- Support hundreds of virtual labs per month
- Support learners across the globe with high speed of delivery and no latency issues
Since starting with Skytap, the company has expanded its use case to external partners – value added resellers and delivery partners. BeyondTrust is also considering expanding the use of Skytap for internal training of its own sales team.
“Skytap is one of the few vendors that I’ve worked with that has maintained the same level of consistency in terms of being customer centric, responsive, supportive, and helpful. That alone keeps us with Skytap.”
Sandra Hanna, Senior Vice President, Education and Enablement
