Customer Leverages IT Lifecycle Management Capabilities by HCL BigFix

Introduction

Enterprises require efficient, scalable, and secure endpoint management solutions, now more than ever. HCL BigFix stands out as a leading platform in endpoint management, known for our ability to automate patching, compliance enforcement, and Server IT Lifecycle Management across diverse environments—physical, virtual, and cloud.

Renowned for our speed, automation, and scalability, HCL BigFix empowers organizations to manage thousands of endpoints with unparalleled accuracy through server lifecycle management capabilities. Its real-time visibility and automation capabilities ensure companies achieve high compliance rates, reduce labor costs, and prevent vulnerabilities—making us the trusted choice for enterprises worldwide. We help organizations maintain compliance with industry regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), PCI DSS, the Accountability Act, and Health Insurance Portability, ensuring robust data protection and secure handling of sensitive information.

Staying compliant with SLAs and keeping costs under control is essential. This success story highlights how a major enterprise leveraged IT Lifecycle Management by HCL BigFix to transform its patching efficiency, save millions in costs, and scale operations. The benefits of IT lifecycle management include improved compliance, enhanced data protection, and streamlined regulatory adherence.

What is IT Lifecycle Management?

IT lifecycle management refers to the structured process of managing IT assets and endpoint systems from procurement through retirement. This involves maintaining a comprehensive asset inventory, managing various device types, and supporting multiple operating systems across the organization. It includes deployment, mobile endpoint management, monitoring, updates, and eventual decommissioning.

The goal is to ensure that all systems remain secure, compliant, and cost-effective while supporting the business community. With HCL BigFix, enterprises can automate these processes and align them with ITIL best practices to maximize efficiency. 

Why Enterprises Need Modern IT Lifecycle Management?

Traditional methods of managing IT assets are no longer sufficient. Enterprises face:

1. Increasingly complex hybrid infrastructures
2. Growing security risks that require risk-based vulnerability management
3. SLA compliance challenges due to inconsistent patching
4. Rising demands for security compliance audits and reporting

Modern endpoint lifecycle management provides centralized visibility and automation to address these challenges. Platforms like HCL BigFix help enterprises eliminate manual inefficiencies while strengthening security compliance management across all endpoints.

6 Steps of IT Lifecycle Management:

A well-defined IT lifecycle includes:

1. Planning & Procurement: Selecting hardware/software aligned with enterprise needs.
2. Deployment & Configuration: Installing and configuring across diverse endpoint systems, including provisioning and configuring new devices to streamline setup and ensure readiness.
3. Monitoring & Patch Management: Continuous monitoring and automated updates, managing endpoints such as remote devices and other endpoints to ensure comprehensive visibility, security, and compliance across the network.
4. Security Compliance Audit: Ensuring adherence to internal and regulatory standards.
5. Optimization & Endpoint Lifecycle Management: Improving utilization through resource rightsizing and automation.
6. Retirement & Risk-Based Vulnerability Management: Secure decommissioning while remediating vulnerabilities.

Key Challenges Before HCL BigFix:

Before implementing HCL BigFix, this customer struggled with inefficiencies that hindered their IT operations. 

Patching compliance was inconsistent, fluctuating between 56% and 76%, making it difficult to meet SLAs. High licensing costs from legacy tools strained budgets, while manual job management across thousands of servers created bottlenecks that slowed down operations. Managing multiple tools for different aspects of endpoint management led to integration issues within the IT infrastructure, and the complexity sometimes required support from managed service providers to maintain efficiency and security.

These challenges underscore the need for a more automated, cost-effective, and advanced endpoint management solution with capabilities like risk-based vulnerability management to proactively minimize threats.

How HCL BigFix Transformed IT Lifecycle Management

By adopting HCL BigFix, our customer was able to completely transform their IT operations. For example, IT lifecycle Management resulted in impressive improvements in compliance, cost efficiency, and scalability. Below are more key areas where HCL BigFix made a measurable impact. The adoption of advanced endpoint management systems, including unified endpoint management, enabled streamlined device oversight and patch deployment across diverse platforms, helping to improve security through proactive vulnerability management and automation.

1. Unparalleled SLA Compliance

Before implementing HCL BigFix, this customer struggled to maintain consistent compliance with their patching SLAs, with compliance percentages fluctuating between 56% and 76%. These gaps left potential vulnerabilities and could result in security risks and penalties. After implementing HCL BigFix, the customer achieved an average compliance rate of 99.9%, maintaining this high standard continuously since 2021. This dramatic improvement not only reduced the security risks but also aligned their operations with industry standards, ensuring a smoother and more secure environment.

HCL BigFix’s centralized platform enabled the IT team to automatically deploy patches across thousands of endpoints in a fraction of the time required by manual processes. With HCL BigFix, the customer was able to fit all necessary patching into the tight 2-hour maintenance window without missing deadlines. The tool's automation capabilities helped ensure compliance across their entire infrastructure, and the real-time visibility provided by HCL BigFix made tracking and managing patching tasks much easier.  By monitoring patch status, maintaining patch documentation, and leveraging threat intelligence feeds, security teams can prioritize and deploy patches more effectively, ensuring vulnerabilities are addressed promptly and compliance is maintained.

2. Significant Cost Savings

One of the most significant advantages of implementing HCL BigFix was the cost savings obtained over a five-year span. Before HCL BigFix, our customer relied on a different Server Management Tool and Database Automation, which were not only costly in terms of licensing but also required substantial manual effort to maintain and manage. By replacing these legacy tools with HCL BigFix IT Lifecycle Management, the customer saved approximately $6 million over a five-year period.

Additionally, HCL BigFix’s improved patching compliance helped the customer avoid costly penalties associated with missed SLAs. By maintaining 99%+ compliance, they significantly reduced the risk of SLA violations, resulting in substantial cost reductions. Labor costs also decreased as HCL BigFix streamlined workflows, eliminating the need for manual intervention and saving the customer an estimated 1,200 hours of manpower per month.

3. Massive Scalability Improvements

The scalability offered by HCL BigFix played a pivotal role in enabling the customer to expand their operations without sacrificing efficiency. In 2021, the customer managed approximately 400 customers and 17,000 virtual servers, and processed around 800 automation jobs during each maintenance window. By 2024, thanks to HCL BigFix’s powerful features, such as the BigFix Server Automation Plan Engine, the customer had scaled their operations significantly. They now manage 700 customers, 26,000 virtual servers, and run 2,450 automation jobs per maintenance window—all with ease.

The shift to HCL BigFix’s Server Automation version 9.5.69 (which introduced a multi-threading feature) further enhanced throughput, increasing processing speed by 60%. This enabled more jobs to be executed in parallel, thereby accelerating patch deployment and reducing downtime.

4. Improved Security and Operational Efficiency

Our customer also benefited from improved security measures and operational efficiency through HCL BigFix's versatile capabilities. For example, during the August 2024 maintenance window, HCL BigFix enabled the customer to:

• Secure over 1,450 WMS servers by creating custom Fixlets for a known vulnerability.
• Deploy a critical upgrade for one of their business applications on 15,500 servers, enhancing endpoint security.
• Conduct a VM rightsizing project, optimizing 479 servers to maximize resource efficiency.
• Complete a JVM upgrade on 132 application servers, ensuring that critical software systems remain up-to-date and secure.
• Introduce pre-patching for Linux security patches in non-production environments, with plans to extend this to production servers in the future.

Additionally, HCL BigFix supports advanced threat detection to identify and respond to cybersecurity threats across all endpoints, including mobile devices. It integrates with MDM solutions to manage and secure smartphones and tablets, enforce security policies, and control network access. Through robust user identity management, HCL BigFix ensures that only authorized users and devices can access sensitive network resources, further strengthening the organization’s security posture.

Real-World Impact of HCL BigFix on Enterprise IT

Moreover, HCL BigFix’s ability to automate vulnerability resolution played a crucial role in remediating over 4,500 external vulnerabilities using the HCL BigFix IVR (Intelligent Vulnerability Remediation) feature. This helped the customer minimize security risks and comply with regulatory requirements without requiring manual intervention. These improvements significantly strengthened the organization's overall security and compliance posture by ensuring all endpoint devices within the organization's infrastructure were effectively managed and protected. Additionally, vulnerabilities on one of their core Business Applications were resolved on 249 servers by creating custom scripts and Fixlets tailored to address the specific security gaps.

Smarter IT Management with HCL BigFix

HCL BigFix has empowered our customers to scale operations, enhance security, and drive massive cost savings while ensuring top-tier SLA compliance. Their success story showcases how automation and efficiency can redefine enterprise IT lifecycle management.

Conclusion

With HCL BigFix, organizations can transform their endpoint management strategy, streamline patch management processes, and scale operations efficiently. This success story illustrates how robust automation and centralized control can reduce operational costs, enhance SLA compliance, and strengthen the overall security posture.

HCL BigFix’s ability to support thousands of virtual servers and automate complex maintenance tasks empowers IT teams to focus on innovation instead of manual effort. By leveraging features such as the newly introduced Multi-threading Server Automation Plan Engine, organizations can scale seamlessly while maintaining optimal performance.

Thousands of enterprise companies are currently facing challenges like inconsistent compliance, escalating costs, or scalability issues, and for them, HCL BigFix provides a proven solution. It’s time to embrace a smarter, faster approach to IT operations and achieve tangible results. Don’t let outdated tools slow your progress—unlock operational excellence with HCL BigFix.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What does lifecycle management mean in IT?

It’s the process of managing IT assets and endpoint systems from purchase to retirement, ensuring efficiency, security, and compliance at every stage.

2. What is the IT lifecycle management plan?

A structured roadmap that defines how enterprises handle deployment, patch management, audits, and retirement of IT assets while maintaining compliance.

3. What are the 5 stages of ITIL?

The ITIL lifecycle includes Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement.

4. What is the ITIL lifecycle?

It’s a framework for managing IT services efficiently, helping organizations improve endpoint lifecycle management and ensure compliance.