Optimising operations

By Sandy Hawke

The BigFix Unified Management Platform has radically changed the way that BGC’s IT staff approaches their daily operational tasks. Thanks to the real-time visibility and control of the BigFix solution, IT has saved money and time, and gets answers to the questions they have about their globally distributed environment – within minutes.
BGC Partners is a leading global intermediary to the wholesale financial markets, specialising in the brokering of a broad range of financial products, including fixed income securities, interest rate swaps, foreign exchange, equities, equity derivatives, credit derivatives, commodities, futures, structured products and other instruments.

Before BigFix, BGC Partners' IT staff struggled to gain certainty about all of the workstations and servers in their environment, the IT team was looking for a solution that could give them a single, unified view into all aspects of their computing infrastructure. Licensing true-ups across the global network were simply not possible - leaving the IT department in the position of taking the vendor's word for it, rather than having a reliable database of installed, used, and authorised software.

When a software vendor notified BGC Partners of their decision to eliminate support for one of their products, the IT staff turned to the BigFix unified management console to determine where the software was installed. Within 20 minutes, the team was able to tell management exactly where the software was installed - giving instant insight into the potential impact of the support termination.

Inventory management via BigFix has provided a powerful way to reduce capital expenditures. The IT department uses BigFix to report when someone on the trading floor logs into a system, documenting via asset tags which systems are in use. This information populates an updated inventory database, allowing the team to re-deploy from the in-house inventory, rather than purchasing a new system.

Initially, BGC planned to deploy BigFix Patch Management for their 5000 Windows workstations and 1500 servers, but soon extended functionality scope based on the power and flexibility of the BigFix Unified Management Platform.

The deployment was straightforward and BigFix Agents were quickly installed throughout the enterprise. Once the single, multi-purpose agent was installed on each system, the BGC team realised that they could literally do anything on the systems they needed to do via the BigFix unified management console.

In order to optimise service delivery to each of the remote sites, the team has installed a BigFix Relay at each location. Additionally, a DMZ-based Relay was installed at the main site in order to support and protect all roaming laptops. Network uptime is critical so IT staff members are appreciative of BigFix's ability to throttle bandwidth usage dynamically in order to avoid performance impacts during maintenance windows.

While BGC had already had an existing patch management system in place, it wasn't meeting their requirements for tracking and controlling systems over their highly distributed environment. When comparing BigFix to the incumbent tool and another they evaluated, Chris Marino, Global Director of IT Procurement at BGC Partners, says, "It's not a fair fight. The ability to solve multiple challenges by leveraging a multi-purpose agent, residing in a single console was ultimately the compelling reason for BGC to choose BigFix. Additionally, the speed with which BigFix could enforce change was another big consideration for the decision."

About

Sandy Hawke, Senior Director, Product Marketing at BigFix Inc., has over 12 years of information security experience in various technical sale, consulting and product marketing roles. Before joining BigFix, she held senior product marketing responsibilities at Blue Coat Systems, Vormetric, Nevis Networks and SenSage.