I recently had a chance to speak with two folks from the Rollins Corporation IT team about something they did to change from being perceived internally as a simple cost center to a business enabler. These IT pros brought together Endpoint Security and Systems Management, which enabled Rollins to reduce their costs, manage their complexity by simplifying their IT infrastructure, and automate their IT processes. All this has become very critical in today's complex IT world and has made the IT team at Rollins far more strategic and relevant to its business.
Let me share a few details about Rollins. Rollins is a private company based in Atlanta, GA. It is best known for its Orkin Pest Control brand. Rollins has over 400 remote sites across North America with limited bandwidth and over 4000 endpoints with 85% in remote locations.
Rollins Needed to Increase its Protection and Simplify its Reporting
The Rollins IT team needed to solve several problems: provide solid endpoint protection for remote locations and mobile users, simplify their security infrastructure while enhancing protection-their AV and patch management solutions were managed with separate tools and by separate departments, and they needed better visibility into the enterprise. They were tired of not having an overall view of endpoint vulnerabilities-their reports were generated by different systems and were generally exported to cumbersome spreadsheets. Rollins was able to achieve success by using its existing endpoint management system from Altiris to deploy Symantec Endpoint Protection. No viruses have impacted Rollins since its deployment. This provided Rollins with a single management console for its reporting, which has effectively enabled Rollins to reduce the time it takes to create reports by 75% and drastically reduce non-productive time spent managing security.
Rollins Needed Better Visibility
The second challenge Rollins faced was to gain better visibility of its environment. Because Rollins has so many end users at remote sites with low bandwidth, getting detailed information from each endpoint was tedious. As is the case today with all businesses, the Rollins' management team wanted to leverage its current IT investments to accomplish more.
Rollins uses the Altiris Client Management Suite dashboard, which provides detailed visibility into its environment. The enhanced status reports enable Rollins to make better decisions, reduce its risk and minimize vulnerabilities. In addition, Rollins has the Altiris Server Management Suite and IT Service Manager. These solutions enable Rollins to do tasks that other teams were just doing on the side and not able to do completely. This allows the other teams to focus more on their primary tasks and do them more efficiently. The Rollins team was able to automate several tasks owned by other teams, which enabled it to take on more-not only the AV infrastructure but also asset disposal, accounting charge backs, AD infrastructure and the Symantec Endpoint Protection project.
A Seat At The Table
Now the Rollins IT pros are talking to different teams, looking for ways to automate more and make life easy for everyone else. At the end of the day, or my post as it were, Rollins has effectively reduced its risk, simplified its environment, protected its current IT investments, and the team increased its visibility. Now the team enjoys being involved with more of the Rollins business discussions, and IT has a seat at the strategic table.
Next time we will be discussing how a Symantec Partner is taking advantage of Endpoint Management opportunities, via traditional security discussions.