NINE NETWORK
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Nine Network Cuts Support Calls in Half
with Centrify Identity Service, Mac Edition
Launched in 1956, Nine Network is a division of Nine Entertainment Co. and one of the two highest-rated
television networks in Australia. With viewership across major cities including Sydney, Melbourne and
Brisbane, Nine’s metro advertising revenue share recently hit a ten year high of 38.7%.
The Challenge
Ensure security protocols as Macs are added into the environment. Eliminate
password sharing to improve auditing and trouble-shooting. Manage strict
password policies and minimize Mac support calls for resets.
Nine Network maintains a broadcast production environment separate from its corporate
network. At Nine, the corporate network is managed by the corporate IT group, while the
broadcast network is managed by the Nine Technology Department.
When the time came for Nine to upgrade and expand its broadcast production and postproduction systems, the platform of choice was Mac. The looming question, however, was
whether a Mac environment would allow for the security and identity prescribed by corporate
IT. Active Directory had been chosen as the means for identity access to both networks so
that users would not need two separate logins, and two different password sets.
“We find that the Centrify
implementation of mobile
accounts for Macs is much better
than Apple’s. With Centrify the
mobile account settings worked
every time on the first login.”
Derrick Meyer, Media Solutions Manager
Nine Network
“When we planned our production and editing system upgrade in 2012, one of the key factors
as to whether to use Windows or Mac was that we had to follow proper IT security policies,”
said Derrick Meyer, Media Solutions Manager for Nine Network.
Security was already becoming a growing concern in the production environment. Securing
proprietary and confidential content on the broadcast network meant they needed a solution
that managed access to resources across domains at a granular level — to the degree that
systems with Internet access would not also have access to key resources. “Without that, we
couldn’t be sure that our material was secure,” says Meyer. “And when you’re dealing with big,
breaking news stories, protecting content is absolutely essential.”
Additionally, because Mac users frequently shared one user name and password across
dozens of machines, IT’s monitoring of logs provided little actionable intelligence. “While we
could identify various system anomalies, we didn’t know who to go to for more information.
We needed to limit users to logging in with individual usernames and passwords for both
auditing and troubleshooting purposes,” he says.
The Solution
Joining Macs to Activity Directory with Centrify Identity Service, Mac Edition
enabled corporate IT security policies to be followed. Centrify’s Zone technology
was particularly appealing due to its ability to set parameters based on
departments or job roles.
Already using JAMF’s Casper software for some limited Mac management, Meyer went to their
online forum for advice. “A lot of users in the JAMF forum recommended Centrify over any
other Mac management products — especially with regard to cross domains.”
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NINE NETWORK
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
After an analysis of the Centrify product, Nine found that they could integrate Centrify with
Casper so that anything that did not have a static username and password could continue to
be managed through Casper, while anything on the Active Directory side would be managed by
Centrify. “When possible, we’re trying to move every server and every network share to Active
Directory,” says Meyer.
“Without Centrify, we wouldn’t
have been able to meet our
own security policy requirements
and that would have limited us
to Windows machines. Macs just
wouldn’t have been an option.”
Derrick Meyer, Media Solutions Manager
Nine Network
Because Nine needed to provide an extra layer of security in specific areas of their network,
they found Centrify’s Zone technology particularly appealing. “With Centrify’s Zone Technology
we saw that we could ensure that even though someone may be a Mac user, they wouldn’t be
able to log onto just any Mac on the network” says Meyer. “We liked the fact that we could set
parameters based on each user’s department or job role.
“We started with a couple of zones and increased it from there. With a bit of experience
we learned how to automate provisioning across the zones, so we’d just drop users into an
Active Directory group and they were automatically set up in Centrify. It was much simpler
than I’d anticipated.
“Implementation was quick, easy and seamless. Users don’t even know it’s there. Now, we don’t
need to do anything with the Mac laptops but join them to Centrify and assign the appropriate
zones. Users can then go home, reboot and log in with their cached password for remote or
off-network access.”
The Results
Centrify has enabled a secure Mac expansion, simplified password
management and dramatically reduced the problem of forgotten login
credentials, cutting support calls by 50%. Today, the company’s 150 Macs
are managed by just two people.
“Without Centrify,” says Meyer, “we would not have been able to fulfill the IT security
requirement for identity management based on Active Directory in a Mac-based environment,
which means we would have ended up with a Windows machines. Macs would not have been
an option.”
Since its Centrify-enabled Mac expansion, Nine Network has expanded its production
environment from 19 Macs to 150 and has become much more efficient in production and
post-production due to a wider choice of editing software, simplified upgrades, and the ability
to stay up-to-date with the camera codecs that encode and decode digital data streams.
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NINE NETWORK
“Centrify has eliminated password
sharing and allowed us to log
on to both our Broadcast and
Corporate IT systems with one
set of credentials. Security has
significantly improved across
the board.”
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Centrify has also simplified password management for both Nine Network employees and tech
support. “We use Centrify for everything from systems to printers and even mobile accounts,”
says Meyer. “Prior to Centrify, password management was very labor intensive. Passwords got
out of sync every three months, and for weeks afterwards we’d be deleting user keychains.
Centrify has eliminated that and dramatically reduced the problem of forgotten login
credentials.”
Today, the broadcast network’s 150 Macs are managed by just two people. “That’s a big win for
us,” says Meyer. “Centrify has cut our Mac support calls by 50 percent and eliminated the
sharing of usernames and passwords across multiple machines.”
Today, every user simply logs in once and gains access to all the resources they’ve been
granted access to. This allows IT to know which user is on which machine. “Now that users log
in through Centrify, if we find something in the logs, we know exactly who to go to. It’s been
really valuable for both auditing and troubleshooting,” says Meyer. “And it’s also much easier to
stay in line with our licensing agreements.”
Derrick Meyer, Media Solutions Manager
Nine Network
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