WHITE PAPER W H I T E P A P E R. ByMartin Chorich, Editorial Director/Evangelist, BigFix, Inc.

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1 W H I T E P A P E R Top 15 ways to save money by using Bigfix ByMartin Chorich, Editorial Director/Evangelist, BigFix, Inc. Years of experience with hundreds of enterprise customers managing millions of network-connected endpoints have revealed many sources of cost savings either directly enabled or expedited by BigFix. At present, we ve identified 15 areas of potential cost reduction. Undoubtedly, this list will grow as we add more functions to the BigFix product line and users report new ways of applying BigFix to save money. In general, BigFix ROI benefits center on labor cost reductions resulting from faster, more complete processes supported by BigFix. Other economic benefits derive from improved visibility and management of physical assets and reduced costs of ownership. Yet another class of economic gains stem from risk reduction and disaster avoidance. In this case, it may be difficult to measure the value of things that didn t happen, but benefits can be just as real as money in the bank.

2 1. Labor cost reduction number one: Improved remediation processes. Remediation processes software updates, configuration changes, vulnerability fixes, and software patches take less time and transact more accurately with BigFix. Staffs spend less time distributing and executing remediations and monitoring their execution throughout an infrastructure. Cost reduction benefits tend to increase as IT staffs gain confidence in BigFix-supported processes and BigFix-supplied remediation content. In the latter instance, organizations find they need to spend less time validating and qualifying BigFix remediation content compared to raw content from software vendors or content of shakier provenance. 2. Labor cost reduction number two: Reduced second pass diagnostics and rework. BigFix customers typically report that first pass success rates for routine remediations increases from percent to percent. This can result in significant savings when one considers that second pass remediation work involving processing help desk trouble tickets, individual diagnosis and fixes can cost 10 to 20 times the cost of an automated, first pass installation and validation of a required remediation. In other words, getting it right the first time may consume only seconds of automated remediation time, while having to go back in to diagnose and re-install a remediation can require minutes of staff time per machine. To give an example of how this works, consider a 10,000 seat installation that achieves a 75 percent first pass success rate. This means that 2,500 machines will require manual re-work. Conservatively estimating 30 minutes of re-work per machine (1,250 hours of staff time) at a fully loaded FTE labor rate of $40 an hour, the organization faces a $50,000 additional cost for each remediation it undertakes. To estimate an annual cost for second pass re-work, assume that this organization synchronizes its patch and update program with the monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday cycle, or twelve times a year. It will therefore spend $600,000 a year to fix things that should have been done right the first time. Needless to say, closing the remediation gap from a 75 percent to 99 percent BigFixenabled first pass success will largely eliminate this cost of failure. 3. Labor cost reduction number three: Quiet helpdesk. Well maintained computers suffer fewer outages, security issues, and other trouble ticket generating events than poorly maintained machines. Enterprise helpdesks process fewer trouble tickets requiring logging, response and resolution. Result: Reduced demand for helpdesk services, either in-house or outsourced. 4. Labor cost reduction number four: Reduced overtime and weekend work. The high reliability of BigFix-support remediation and system management processes reduces the need to schedule these actions after normal working hours and holidays. Not only do IT staffs really like not having to work unsociable hours, it cuts overtime costs. 5. Labor cost reduction number five: Undistracted non-technical employees. Many organizations rely on voluntary efforts of end users to perform at least some maintenance and other administrative tasks on their computers. The time involved may seem trivial, but can easily add up to several hours a year per employee. Also, non-expert executed remediation actions tend to suffer low first pass success rates and generate more than their fair share of trouble tickets. Besides, how complete can any organization expect voluntary efforts to be? Which would be more effective? A poster and campaign reminding staff to turn off their computers at nights and weekends to save electricity, or power management controls automatically executed across an organization? 6. Security damage avoidance. It s often difficult to determine the value of a disaster avoided, but consider the following. After suffering a virus and worm attack that cost a major US university $1.6 million in lost productivity, damaged infrastructure and repair costs, the University President told the IT staff that this kind of thing should never happen again. After the University implemented a broad scale BigFix solution, they have not suffered security incidents anywhere the near the magnitude of the disaster that led to the BigFix purchase in the first place. 7. Reduced remediation side effects. Customers report that maintenance and remediation actions performed via BigFix do not generated the same level of side effects (service outages, blue screens of death, performance melt downs) that they experienced with previous methods. This feeds through to reduced need for pre-testing and validating management actions, shorter vulnerability windows, lower help desk costs, reduced need to schedule actions after normal working hours, and improved end-user productivity.

3 8. Functional consolidation. The ability to perform a lengthening list of operational and security management tasks through the BigFix console streamlines these processes and deepens the expertise of the people performing them. IT staffs face reduced need to cultivate specialized skills or hire expensive outside consultants to perform specialist tasks. It also reduces the need to purchase licenses for various kinds of single-function software and administer associated purchasing and asset management processes. 9. Security software license cost consolidation also known as creative commoditization. By adding and consolidating previously discrete functions such as anti-virus, anti-spyware, personal firewall, policy enforcement, and network access control, BigFix can significantly reduce licensing costs for comparable brand-name software while delivering equivalent or better quality of results. Many of these commercially available packages are rapidly entering the commoditization phase of their product life cycles. BigFix is only too happy to speed this process. But as these particular functions become commoditized, value is shifting to the ability to manage and orchestrate their operations via a centralized, consolidated management infrastructure which is exactly what the BigFix Platform provides. 10. Reduced management infrastructure costs. One of the beauties of the BigFix single-agent architecture is that managed devices themselves supply the processing power and system resources to support their management. Not only does BigFix NOT require a redundant, parallel infrastructure of servers and appliances to manage an infrastructure, this form of self-provisioning creates a virtuous cycle of available resources that scales the solution to manage large infrastructures. In short, the more devices under management, the more resources available to support their management. In the meantime, a $5,000-class server is sufficient to manage 50, ,000 endpoints in a BigFix solution. Rather than attempting to control endpoints, the BigFix server s role centers on providing an operator interface and keeping track of what s going on in the infrastructure as reported by its endpoints. By contrast, many solutions require so many servers and additional infrastructure, organizations need to employ additional administrators dedicated to servicing the management fabric. 11. Optimized applications software licensing costs. BigFix visibility into endpoint operations enables administrators to know which computers are using software licenses and which are not. In most cases, customers who use this ability have been able to reduce the number of software licenses they buy and consequently save money. We know of a hospital that discovered it had office applications (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, internet browser) running on clinical systems and an electric utility that discovered the same kind of software running on PCs controlling electric power substations. Few people use X-ray machines to do presentations or head to the nearest power substation to surf the web. In both cases, these organizations were able to trim back their applications software site licenses at renewal time and reallocate the money they saved to other purposes. 12. Hardware inventory reduction. When customers install a BigFix solution they are often surprised to discover that they have more computers on their network than they thought they had usually in the neighborhood of 25 percent above forecast. With this information in hand, they can retire surplus and obsolete machines and identify computers that shouldn t be on the network in the first place. Cutting the population of computers not only reduces excess inventories of a capital good, but also trims support and service costs (maintaining network connections, software, helpdesk, etc.) for surplus and ghost machines. It is also more than likely that dark matter computers also raise security risks as these machines frequently run obsolete, unpatched software, harbor malware, may be acting as zombies, or as gateways for intrusions. 13. Reduced electricity costs. The BigFix Power Management content module enables IT organizations to switch off large proportions of their desktop PC infrastructure when not in use. This cuts electricity consumption costs between $20-90 per computer per year (depending on computer characteristics and power management policies in force) and may make an organization eligible for tax benefits and participation in carbon trading schemes. As noted earlier, setting and enforcing policies of this kind are more effective than depending on voluntary actions by end users to achieve the same result. 14. Reduced compliance costs. Not only do BigFix customers rely on BigFix to act as their system of truth for technical controls and other regulatory compliance information, the real-time visibility characteristics of the solution cuts administrative costs associated with compliance. Instead of running a report whenever compliance managers request one, BigFix users can set up mechanisms to continually feed real-time information into various kinds of report templates for anytime access by compliance managers. Furthermore, the quality and depth of compliance information supplied by BigFix solutions has often positively impressed regulators, clearing the way for accelerated certification and approval processes.

4 15. Litigation exposure reduction. Do you know what kinds of content is stored or transacted on your infrastructure? What if employees develop a major jones for pirated music, movies, or porn? Or if zombiefied computers on your network expend 90 percent of their capacity spewing spam all over the world? With BigFix, you would know if these kinds of antics are occurring in your infrastructure and could set policies to either prevent these kinds of activities or at least demonstrate that the organization has taken credible measures to prevent misuse of enterprise computing assets. An article of this kind is superficial by its very nature. We would be happy to sit down discuss in more detail how to harvest any of these benefits at real-world customer settings. Our purpose in this article is not so much to tell readers everything they should know about economic returns from BigFix, but to inspire them to want to learn more. 2007, BigFix, Inc. BigFix and the BigFix Logo are registered trademarks of BigFix, Inc. Other trademarks, registered trademarks, and service marks are property of their respective owners. WPSAVE

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