Addressing Vulnerabilities for Manufacturing Supply Chain Company
An electrical distributor with more than 300 employees across a dozen locations specializes in Industrial Automation and power solutions, delivering high-quality products to manufacturing plants, machine builders, and construction teams.
Unifying Endpoint Management to Secure a Distributed Workforce
After years of inconsistent service with previous solutions, while facing increasingly urgent security threats, the company sought a single endpoint management and security solution that would enable it to improve support to their distributed employees across several states and face the challenge of remediating critical vulnerabilities.
The pre-built vulnerability scripts are ridiculous because obviously things cost money. But if it’s a dollar-and-cents kind of math, it’s not even a conversation. The amount of time that something like that saves is just invaluable.
How They Did It
Deploying Patches and Updates at Scale
The company used the Absolute Security solution to manage hundreds of endpoints, delivering patches and feature updates without having to rely on end users. After facing multiple critical vulnerabilities, the electrical distributor turned to the Absolute Security solution to improve their endpoint security. They now use the solution as part of a unified management and security approach, utilizing tools such as the vulnerability scanner to verify results and findings, automated feature updates, and real-time device reporting to ensure the security of their endpoints.
Manage and Secure Corporate Devices Across Multiple States
The company’s small IT team supports the enterprise infrastructure of 12 locations across the southeastern United States. Up until 2021, the company outsourced management of its networking, server maintenance, and endpoint management to managed service providers (MSPs). However, with consolidation across the MSP market, the company ultimately chose to bring this management in-house to improve visibility and business operations.
Reducing the Burden with Unified Security and Endpoint Management
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the distributor’s transition from in-office work at its 12 locations to a hybrid work model created significant burdens on the small IT operations staff. With offices spread across several southeastern states, technicians were spending hours trying to update endpoints: some drove hundreds of miles to physically update devices, while others had to rely on end users to manage updates. This left the IT team without an efficient way to manage or monitor devices. In particular, the team struggled to stay up to date with Windows patches on remote and roaming devices. Now, with the Absolute Security solution, they can push the update out automatically, targeting devices as they come online and reporting on the success or failure of the install on each device. This gives the team a global view of the status of the environment, including identifying devices that are missing feature updates and resolving the issue before the network is exposed.
Eliminating Vulnerabilities and Reducing Risk
The company’s IT team was able to quickly report to leadership on the status of its devices with the Absolute Security solution’s vulnerability reports. The reports provided real-time data on the health of the environment, giving the electrical distributor’s executive team a clear view of their risk and exposure and the effectiveness of the vulnerability remediation process. At the end of the day, all parties were confident the company’s infrastructure was secure.
- Saves critical time by reducing mean-time-to-respond with pre-built vulnerability scanning
- Accurately monitors, detects, and remediates vulnerabilities in near-real time
- Saves hours of driving to physical locations and reliance on end users
- Keeps every endpoint up-to-date easily and efficiently with scheduling and reporting of patches
