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Andrea Goldoni of Coop Estense discusses IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager software, BigFix technology and using IBM solutions for retail workstation and server management.
My name is Andrea Goldoni; I work for Coop Estense, a company that retails food and nonfood items.
As a company in the retail sector, we obviously have the need to be compliant with regard to the PCI DSS, so we needed to have the endpoints guaranteed as PCI DSS and therefore be able to manage all the patch and control management, network access by possible outside intrusions or guests that entered the network.
There are 2,500 endpoints for the part interested in the BigFix, where there are all the desktop devices used in the company.
The approach was basically manual, and there was, however, a patch deploy with a firewall applied together with all the rules necessary for compliance. However, this gave its results and brought compliance into the company, but obviously the long-term management proved very complex and above all it was a problem to maintain long-term compliance. Therefore from this point there was the need to implement a solution that could automate compliance of all the endpoints without having an added management burden for the IT personnel.
BigFix helped us in many ways in that it became operational very rapidly and therefore we soon managed to deploy the agent on all the machines and render them immediately active.
The next phase to make it compliant was almost child's play and so the necessary fixes were applied and very soon, in a week, we brought the whole solution to order bringing everything that was needed into compliance.
From the BigFix platform we acquired all the modules; those obviously more interesting for us are obviously the security part, but also the patch management, the software distribution, the asset management and the power management regarding the parts of consumption and energy saving that is obviously a heartfelt issue.
When it comes to investment return, we have carried out various analyses. Therefore we are based on the ROI and mainly on the products that BigFix has replaced. BigFix replaced a range of products that we obviously already had in the company: from the antivirus to patch management and remote control. The ROI proved relatively simple because the unification of these products and their maintenance cost more than the acquisition of BigFix and from here, obviously, the calculation of the ROI.
There are many risks and threats in a retail company, above all from the part tied to the point of sale and above all from the part of bank payments. The most important thing in the implementation of BigFix was the response times of the solutions to possible problems, possible virus infections or possible intrusions.
The response times of previous solutions were however long, perhaps not so much the response on the part of the principal server, but much longer obviously on the distribution to the endpoints—something that BigFix obviously solved, noticeably reducing the resolution times of the possible intrusions or possible infections that the company faced.
From here we carried out a series of comparative analyses between various producers and the leader and, however, the software that we found the best was BigFix.
As a partner IBM is without doubt fundamental on the part of the infrastructure and from here having IBM also on the security part allows us to have a wider vision of the whole infrastructure and all the security linked to the infrastructure.
With its vision of the infrastructure, IBM allows us to have a 360° cover of the whole IT infrastructure chain.
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The Best of IBM Tivoli Endpoint Managerby ibmservicemanagement8,660 views
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