Snow and BigFix Inventory: More Data, Less Agents
One of the biggest challenges IT leaders reported facing over the past 12 months has been supporting the remote workforce, according to Snow’s new 2021 IT Priorities Report. Covid-19 has changed traditional ways of working, and in turn, it has also opened new opportunities for security risks and complicated endpoint management routines. Organizations often struggle to find the right balance of accessibility and governance to effectively manage their technology resources for the dispersed workforce.
As one of our survey respondents noted, “Nobody had expected a pandemic and we were therefore not prepared for the majority of employees to work in the home office. We had to invest heavily in telephony as well as IT security, especially endpoint security, at short notice.”
Many organizations have also doubled down on core services such as Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe to support their remote workforce, and some even introduced completely new tools to help them weather the pandemic. With new technology adopted across the business and limited visibility, improving endpoint management for employees has become a top priority for IT leaders. That starts with knowing what’s being used and by whom.
Introducing BigFix Inventory
Snow and HCL Technologies have worked closely together to enhance the existing integration between BigFix Inventory and the Snow platform. With a new connector recently introduced, customers can now use raw data collected by the BigFix agent that is then normalized by Snow’s technology to get a far more comprehensive view of their technology assets, and without the hassle of deploying additional agents.
Since it’s a standalone product, you can use BigFix independently or alongside other products in the BigFix family to create a robust inventory data warehouse where you can browse technology asset insights and generate reports. With BigFix and Snow, enterprise teams can better understand what technology is available for their remote workforce, and how to keep users patched and running on the right programs.
How can BigFix Inventory help?
BigFix is a single, intelligent agent that can help you with IT budget planning, license reconciliation, audit defense, migration planning, and security, all with minimal impact on your system performance. No matter the size of the environment, BigFix helps IT and security teams collaborate by monitoring for unauthorized software and removing software which poses a security threat or falls outside of the approved software/applications list.
Maintain an up-to-date inventory of assets
With BigFix, you can identify licensed and unlicensed software to track software usage patterns and trends across Windows, UNIX, Linux and macOS endpoints. It allows customers to maintain an up-to-date inventory of IBM software assets so organizations can see what IBM software they have, where it is, and how it is being used. As it monitors processor value unit (PVU) and resource value unit (RVU) MAPC consumption under full and sub-capacity licensing terms, customers can see their current license consumption and also predict their future usage. This data is critical for organizations looking to maintain or reduce technology spending or avoid a costly audit.
We have several customers with large IBM estates, who are using BigFix Inventory to manage their IBM software assets. Because of the cost and resource implications involved in rolling out and supporting additional agents, these customers prefer to take a “zero agent” approach when it comes to installing and using supplementary technology. BigFix Inventory is an essential part of their technology ecosystem.
Technology intelligence improves endpoint management
Understanding how and why employees use specific technologies, along with a clear understanding of the resources an organization has across its ecosystem is essential. At Snow, we call that technology intelligence. During the pandemic especially, IT teams need end-to-end visibility across their IT ecosystem, especially their endpoints, to optimize spend, maximize value and minimize risk.
With HCL BigFix, you can get more value out of what you already have deployed. Although the BigFix solution is mainly focused on IBM products, our recently released connector allows you to normalize the vendor data beyond just IBM through Snow’s Data Intelligence Service (DIS) database, without deploying additional agents.
Learn how Snow and BigFix work together to keep costs to a minimum and deliver more insight about your endpoint devices.