Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- IBM BigFix
Tech Stack
- Patch Management
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
Services
- System Integration
- Training
About The Customer
The Co-operative Group Ltd. is a British consumer cooperative, wholly run and owned by its members. It is the largest organisation of its kind in Europe, with over six million members. The group comprises a diverse range of businesses, the largest of which is The Co-operative Food: a chain of food and convenience stores employing some 70,000 people. The Co-operative Food’s retail estate is vast, and encompasses approximately 2,800 stores across the UK. The company manages an extensive network of endpoint devices, including tills, servers and back-office workstations, which are essential to the smooth running of daily business.
The Challenge
The Co-operative Food, a large retail chain in the UK, needed to develop a more unified approach to patch management to improve compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and enhance security across its retail network. The company manages an extensive network of endpoint devices, including tills, servers, and back-office workstations, which are essential to the smooth running of daily business. As a company in the retail sector, it is vital for The Co-operative Food to maintain compliance with PCI DSS, which requires all retailers accepting payment cards to comply with a number of standards, one of which is ensuring that all endpoint devices have the latest security patches installed. All critical security patches must be installed within one month of release.
The Solution
The Co-operative Food commissioned Gyrocom Limited to perform an evaluation of patch management solutions on the market. After reviewing offerings from five vendors, Gyrocom presented The Co-operative Food with two final options, one of which was the IBM BigFix solution. The company signed a full contract with IBM in early 2012 and began a full roll-out of the BigFix solution soon afterwards. The solution places a single intelligent agent on each endpoint, which sends regular messages to a central management server and pulls patches and configurations to the endpoint when necessary to comply with a relevant policy. As a result of the agent’s intelligence and speed, the central management server always knows the compliance and change status of endpoints, enabling rapid and up-to-date compliance reporting.
Operational Impact
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