I work for a school board in Nova Scotia, Canada. Currently we run approximately 10,000 PC’s in the school districts, plus approximately 50 + NDS / MS servers. I was reading about the bigfix security management software etc, and I would like to find out more to see if this is something that would be good for us.
Currently we combine NAV, VNC and deepfreeze on our local PC’s to combat changes to PC’s / malware & viruses and remote support etc. Will Bigfix accomplish these tasks that we are currently undertaking?
So, the questions that I have are as follows:
#1. Does this product offer remote support of PC’s LAN / WAN?
#2. It says in the advertisement that items such as Viruses / Malware are identified by this product, how does this work - is there a AV scanning agent from Bigfix or do we still need to purcahse a seperate AV agent - ?
#3. Can this software lock down PC’s so that no changes can be made to the image?
#5. In a scenario of 10,000 PC’s, how many management servers would there be needed - based on 100 separate schools with 10,000 PC’s.
#4. I am looking at options for security & management for the school district I.T infrastructures. We would like to eventually accomplish this task with one product if possible because it would mean less managing etc.
If someone could let me know, it would be appreicated.
It sounds a lot like BigFix can help you a bunch. We have several large customers in Canada and several large school districts all over the world (and including Canada) as customers.
I think your questions will be best answered by a discussion with a sales engineer and I have forwarded your questions to an engineer who can directly assist you.
Here are some quick answers to get you started:
Yes. We integrated directly with MS Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop tools to do remote shared help desk troubleshooting and also to do complete remote control.
BigFix offers 2 major ways to help: 1) “Client Manager for AV” – Helps you make sure all computers have AV installed, running, and updated (we support 5 major AV products). 2) BigFix offers fully integrated AntiVirus and AntiSpyware solution (the core AV/AS engine and definitions are from a partner, but everything else is BigFix) if you want to buy your anti-malware solutions completely from BigFix.
Are you referring to the same functionality as DeepFreeze? If so, then no… but several organizations run BigFix and DeepFreeze side-by-side.
One BigFix Server will manage up to 200,000 computers. So you can use one BigFix Server for your 10,000 PCs. (Our largest school district customer manages 110,000 computers from one BigFix Server.)
That is great because that is our value proposition: BigFix has a very powerful, scalable, and flexible platform that can consolidate many different functions around security and operations for a low-cost (in terms hardware, maintenance, and overall total cost of ownership)… but I am sure a salesperson will tell you all about this.
We use BigFix at Edmonton Public Schools 20000+ clients for everything from power management to software deployment. There are modules for enabling remote desktop support everywhere in your district with the click of an icon.
Let me know if you’d like the skinny on our very positive experiences. I’m sure someone at BigFix can set you up to talk with me if you’d like.