IBM BigFix: Patch Management Overview and Analysis

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Company Description

IBM’s security division offers a range of enterprise security products and services. The company monitors 35 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries. IBM acquired BigFix in 2010.

Product Description

IBM BigFix is a collaborative endpoint management and security platform for IT Infrastructure and security professionals. It provides real-time endpoint data from a single tool that can re-image remote devices, distribute and patch software, discover and inventory new assets, assess application usage, and monitor and enforce compliance polices across many types of devices using multiple versions of Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux (*nix) operating systems and applications. It is offered as an independent patch management solution as well as being part of an endpoint management and security platform.

“BigFix can achieve 99% first-pass success rates with patching and remediation efforts, which rapidly reduces the attack surface,” said Teresa Worth, Global Product Marketing Manager, IBM Endpoint Security (BigFix). “In addition, it can find and remove unauthorized downloads which may contain malware, and keep anti-virus and other critical software applications running and current.”

Markets and Use Cases

BigFix is used by thousands of organizations of all sizes on more than 100 million endpoints worldwide.

Applicable Metrics

BigFix continuously collects thousands of attributes from endpoints and sends them to a single management server. First query results are returned within 15 seconds, with full query on 120,000 nodes returned within 5 minutes. Each query is updated every 15 seconds for up to 10 minutes. BigFix supports a catalogue of more than 8,000 software vendors and 40,000 titles across 100+ current and prior versions of Windows, Mac and variations of Unix operating systems.

Intelligence

BigFix has an intelligent agent that forces decision making and calculations to be performed at the endpoint rather than at a higher level in the network. This results in lower network bandwidth consumption, a smaller server footprint, and faster time to deploy, configure and remediate endpoints. BigFix is integrated with IBM Resilient to perform deep dive analysis on suspect endpoints. Endpoint data is displayed in IBM QRadar SIEM console, so security teams can prioritize incidents to remediate quickly.

Method of Delivery

BigFix is an on-premises solution.

Agents

BigFix has an agent that forces decision making and calculations to be performed at the endpoint rather than at a higher level in the network. This results in less network bandwidth consumption, smaller server footprint (less powerful/less expensive server requirements) and faster time to deploy, configure and remediate endpoints.

Pricing

  • BigFix Patch – Starts at $2.49 per client device per year
  • BigFix Inventory – Starts at $14.95 per client device per year
  • BigFix Lifecycle – Starts at $43.80 per client device per year
  • BigFix Compliance – Starts at $43.80 per client device per year

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