Continuous Business Benefit Realization With HCL BigFix

Recently I had the pleasure of spending quality time with a few BigFix clients and partners. In those meetings, two themes merged:

1. Organizations using HCL BigFix are saving money and reducing complexity
2. HCL BigFix technical advisors in Asia Pacific are highly skilled and effectively in helping organization implement best practices that improve IT staff productivity.

Here is an example: The IT leadership in a major Malay Bank wished to highlight the potential savings and benefits provided by BigFix for their executive management team. I shared how a Bank in Australia calculated the value of BigFix Power Management (a capability of BigFix Lifecycle), showing a $10,000 per month savings on utility bills from only ½ of the managed endpoints. The team at the Malay bank used the same calculations and discovered that BigFix could save the bank $250,000 in power savings!

Now, I’ll discuss these two themes in greater depth.

Save Money and Reduce Complexities with BigFix

With all my discussions with clients and partners, IT organizations of all sizes are continually challenged to reduce costs and simplify operations. Cost savings initiatives are always important to improve profitability, especially when revenues are decreasing or flat. Fortunately, BigFix can slash costs and improving IT processes and staff productivity in the following ways:

• Consolidate Tools – Many organizations have unintentionally created management silos, often based on operating system, requiring a specialized staff and numerous infrastructure components. BigFix can help organizations consolidate tools, reduce costs, and improve staff efficiency.
• Automate Compliance – Patch and regulatory compliance as cyberattack continue to rise and threaten business operations. BigFix continuously enforces configuration compliance with thousands of out-of-the-box security checks aligned with industry-standard security benchmarks, and speeds reporting.
• Reduce Software Costs – BigFix for software asset management lets you reduce software costs by’ identifying unused or underused licenses, and dramatically reducing the time required to conduct a comprehensive software asset inventory.
• Speed Patching – Patch cycles, inclusive of remediation of failed patches, are often long and labor intensive. BigFix helps speed patch cycles by providing pre-build Fixlets for many operating systems and third-party applications. The BigFix autopatch capability specifically speeds initial testing of patches.
• Save Energy– Implementing power management across all managed desktops can reduce power consumption, energy costs, and security risk. As with the Malay Bank, BigFix Power Management has gained renewed interest to many IT and security organizations because (1) power savings can drive a significant operating expense reduction, (2) the risk of security incidents and breaches can be reduced, and (3) first pass patch success rates can be improved. These three objectives can be realized using BigFix Power Management, a capability included in BigFix Lifecycle.

Engagement of HCL BigFix Technical Advisors

BigFix, like any other management application, benefits from the use of best practices, maintenance routines and the professional guidance from the vendor.

Did you know that HCL offers Health Checks for your BigFix environment? One of which is our technical advisor-led Health check. The Technical Advisor-led Health Check is a one-on-one journey with one of our skilled technical advisors who is valued resource at HCL who has years of experience with BigFix, and in many cases, has run BigFix in large environments as a client. A Technical Advisor-led Health Check requires only a few hours of time and reviews:

• How you are applying your knowledge and best practices to your BigFix environment
• Whether you are performing key maintenance tasks on a prescribed interval
• Action history, types of actions and their impact to the environment
• Relay configurations including your DMZ relay
• Recommended changes to environment
• Functions you may have licensed but have not implemented
• Upgrade advice
• Additional HCL resources that may be helpful to engage

The above is a formal engagement with the HCL BigFix technical team, however, we also have service offerings by our HCL BigFix professional services team as well as our dedicated HCLSoftware partners. All these teams are here to ensure you maximize the Business benefit from your current and future investments in HCL BigFix.

Reach out to your local HCL BigFix Product Specialist to discuss the business benefits of BigFix. As the year draws to a close, we look forward to helping with our current and future clients in 2023 and beyond.