Case Study: The Mechanics Bank achieves system protection and a 50% CPU load reduction with AppSense DesktopNow

The Mechanics Bank ensures system protection and improves Quality of Service with AppSense

The Mechanics Bank, a $2.5 billion community bank with 32 branches based in Richmond, CA, faced growing IT challenges: users introducing unauthorized applications and plug-ins, frequent browser hijacks and malware, time-consuming weekly emergency maintenance, an inundated help desk, and CPU/memory‑hungry apps that threatened to require more hardware. IT needed a proactive, low‑overhead way to lock down and optimize its 16 Citrix servers supporting ~480 concurrent users.

The bank deployed AppSense DesktopNow (after a five‑week passive monitoring period) to automatically control application access and resource use. The solution blocked harmful executables and browser hijacks, eliminated emergency maintenance windows, cut average CPU load from ~20% to ~10%, saved about 225 MB of memory per server, and dramatically reduced help‑desk calls while improving application response times.

The Mechanics Bank

Ray Anderson

Lead Systems Engineer