Large organizations with multiple sites struggle with ensuring technology compliance across every location. Engineers on site are provided regular corporate directives to push security patches, overhaul the OS (like the recent move to Win10) or other critical technology infrastructure changes. Directives are communicated via email or company-wide communication channels, with limited feedback loops to inform the corporation that the requested change has been enacted.
CTOs and CISOs face two major hurdles in accurately communicating corporate directives to their teams and ensuring their deployment. The first is knowing which sites require an update and the second is having proper feedback on which sites have deployed the update (or are running into issues).
The first problem occurs because most sites don’t have a clear understanding or record of all the technology, model numbers and versions that are running across their technical infrastructure. Without a clear understanding of what is installed and running at various sites, corporate directives turn into a “spray and pray approach,” where corporate directives are sent to all sites without clarity that they are actually relevant. Engineers at each site may waste time researching their asset inventory only to find out that the update is not relevant to them.
The second problem resides with the feedback loop. There is often little or no feedback that the mandated update or change has been implemented. With a diversity of communication channels (slack, email, MS Teams, weekly meetings, etc) and a limited set of tools to track compliance (often just excel) there is little definitive clarity that the update has been implemented. When these critical updates are not implemented in all the required locations, then the company is opened up for potential security breaches and downtime incidents.
BEAM solves these two problems with our Updates module. Through Updates, corporate engineers can select assets that meet certain criteria across all of their sites/locations and generate an “internal update” that is deployed to relevant engineers or technicians at each site. The site engineers now have a clear understanding of the exact assets that are affected by the corporate directive and can utilize the Updates module to prioritize, assign, and eventually mark the update as complete. Corporate engineers on the other side can track that each site has received the update and can ensure compliance across every asset at every site.
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