ControlUp Research – What we learned from studying 238 million logons

We recently concluded a big data research, studying individual application and VDI logons over a period of just under 2 years. Our findings led to the first-ever benchmark driven by global community data, which suggests a definitive guideline as to how long a healthcare organization’s logon process should take, and what are realistic goals for performance improvement. Below is a description of what you’ll read about in the paper, or you can just download it here.

The intent with our research is to establish a definitive healthcare organization benchmark as to what is a good, an average and a poor logon speed. If you’re in healthcare IT, we recommend you read this research not only to see where you rank, but also to learn what you can do about poor logon performance.

As mentioned, this was an extensive research on a very large dataset. We looked at 238 million logons over a 22 month period in real-world, production environments. This paper focuses on healthcare organizations because we believe logon performance has a particularly significant impact on productivity given some work patterns which are common in this industry. Healthcare professionals tend to log in/out more often per day, and long (or unpredictable) logons can directly impact a provider’s productivity, job satisfaction, and even patient care. A delay of 40 seconds to logon means the healthcare provider might switch task and come back to their desktop.

In addition to speed, logon consistency matters too. An unpredictable logon that varies from 20 seconds to 1 minute 20 seconds has a different set of implications; users may switch to another task, get frustrated, become less productive, and possibly even lower the quality of patient care.

Lastly, in this paper we cover how to collect logon metrics, what the metrics mean, how they compare to other healthcare organizations, common causes of long logons, and we recommend four actionable steps to improve logon performance, should you need to. Investing in hardware or software for even a modest performance improvement can have a dramatic impact at the organization’s aggregate level.

You can download this research here.