Genuine Parts Company and ESM Technology Inc Develops Innovative Visibility and Analytics Solution Using BigFix
Genuine Parts Company (GPC) is a Global organization engaged in the retail distribution of automotive and industrial replacement parts. They have approximately 58,000 employees and over 10,000 operations in 17 countries across North America, Europe, and Australasia.
Damian Apone, GPC Director of Global Governance, Risk, & Compliance, has been working with ESM Technology Inc. to address the hurdles of managing multiple subsidiaries across the world. BigFix enabled GPC to have a single pane of glass, for patching, vulnerability management, and most importantly, visibility to ALL assets.
“We initially leveraged BigFix to gain global visibility and consistency on the patch status of our environment which prior to BigFix was siloed and unavailable, and spread across multiple patching solutions,” Apone says. Gaining global visibility was the first of the two-pronged approach and improved over-all management of the highly distributed endpoint environment.
ESM Technology Inc has been delivering Endpoint Management and IT Security Solutions as a HCL Partner for the past 10 years. Connie Lamicela, ESM Technology Manager, is a huge proponent of BigFix Insights and its ability to consolidate all BigFix data into an externally available data lake. ESM Technology, using BigFix Insights, provided GPC‘s Operational and Executive Departments business analytics and historical trends for the first time.
“At the core of the entire solution is the BigFix platform,” Lamicela mentions. “Because BigFix offers more than patching and vulnerabilities, BigFix Insights, an intrinsic part of the platform, was the glue that put this second prong approach together. We’re using the BigFix Insights data lake capabilities to provide an analytical global dashboard that communicates, not only patch information, but also a deep dive into the vulnerabilities.”
Once global visibility was achieved, ESM Technology built near real-time dashboards for all levels of the organization. They depict operational metrics and allow Genuine Parts Company to improve operational efficiency by providing insight on critical asset mean time to patch, CVE Compliance and over-all performance metrics on Patching KPIs. Operationalizing the global data with the dashboard shown below was the second of the two-pronged approach.
Damian Apone’s strategic necessity to provide value to IT Operations, IT Security and the IT Executive Team came to fruition as ESM built the analytical reporting on top of BigFix Insights.
A walk through of the analytical dashboard indicates a 12-month patching trend and drill down into more detail. In particular, Apone talks about the value of the Executive View rendering Genuine Parts Company’s performance on patching vulnerabilities. Another benefit is the IT operation team’s heavy reliance on the Patching KPI reports. Apone says “We now know our average days of outstanding patches, how much are patched in 30 days, and our mean-time-to-patch. We see it globally all the way down to the individual machines, whether workstation or server.”
About ESM Technology, Apone says, “ESM Technology understands our business. They’re always available, they’re always helpful. They never say no. I cannot endorse them strongly enough as a preferred partner and partner of choice, especially pertaining to BigFix.”
Together, Genuine Parts Company and ESM Technology Inc. took HCL BigFix to new levels.
For more information about ESM, visit esm-technology.com. For information about this blog, email ajs@esm-technology.com.
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