In today's fluctuating economy, the ability of electronics companies to adapt to changing business conditions requires a service oriented infrastructure. To be service oriented means to be continually focused on the business and improving service while improving infrastructure efficiency and reducing costs, and effectively managing risk to ensure security, scalability and availability.When IT infrastructure is designed to be service-oriented, it focuses on supporting and enabling employees, partners, and customers in a highly responsive way. Extending your business to an increasingly connected and collaborative world requires the confidence and trust that your infrastructure is secure and resilient. This presentation focuses on how IBM’s endpoint management solution can bring efficiency and cost reduction to an electronics company’s dynamic infrastructure capabilities. The solution delivers value to these companies by reducing the cost of operations, improving the control of endpoints and helping them manage processes more efficiently.
Every company faces a unique set of business situations and brings a unique set of resources and assets, strengths, and advantages to the marketplace. But what are the universal ‘imperatives’ that electronics companies have to get right in order to play a winning game?At IBM, we’ve organized our thinking around three such imperatives—what we call the ‘Smarter Electronics imperatives.’ Create Innovative Products and Services, and Provide Differentiated Innovative Customer Experiences Build and Optimize Dynamic Value chainsTo create innovative products & services that are intuitive to the user, electronics companies need to create deeper relationships with customers. This means including them in early on in the product development process for needed insight and input requirements, and continuing the dialogue after market introduction to determine needed product & service changes. This is what we call as customer-driven innovation. Every opportunity to interact with the customer gives a make or break moment for the company to enhance a customer experience which in turn translates to greater customer loyalty and satisfaction.To build dynamic value chains, we need to synchronize operations across the supply chain, optimize our manufacturing processes, and globally integrate corporate support functions. The key here is to build value chains that are open, highly visible, and collaborative across the business ecosystem of suppliers and partners.
The major challenge for Electronics industry is to identify the status of all the endpoint across platform and form factor. This may including network-attached servers and desktops, Internet-connected laptops, smart phones and tablets, self-service kiosks, BYOD (Bring your own device). Once the above is established the next challenge is the up-to-date implementation of patches, security compliance, automate remediation of endpoint issues.The third challenge is to continuously update and keep the endpoints compliant with current electronics industry compliance standards. IBM’s Endpoint Management solution helps address all these problems. Its unique capabilities of single console control of different platforms and scalable solution of managing more than 250K endpoints from one server reduce the resource needed to manage the diversified infrastructure of Banks. The automation of patch management, power management, security management etc helps in effective implementation of bank’s IT policies. The continuous updating of security policies ensures continuous compliance. Its ability to generate real time reports helps IT department makes better and timelier decisions on security policies, asset purchases and security audit.BigFix technology in the software helps in supporting the sudden virus and malware attacks by identifying the exact patches to the correct endpoints across the network within the oilfields . The control is provided by a single management console .This approach provides effective decision making to the endpoints.Manages configurations for connection and content delivery functions such as email, VPNs and wireless networks making the platforms secure and maintaining privacyProvides Precise and up-to-the minute visibility into and continuous implementation of security configurations and patches. The intelligent agent built into the IBM solution autonomously initiates update and configuration actions to keep the endpoint current and compliant with organizational policies .
This figure shows a typical lifecycle of IEM in the life cycle of processes for Endpoint Management.IBM endpoint management solutionsIBM endpoint management solution meets the needs of the electronics enterprises with a centralized management solution that performs multiple tasks across multiple platforms and devicesCan support up to 250,000 endpoints from a single management server, regardless of network connectivityIts unified console and easy-to-use graphical user interface provides visibility to all endpointsSupports using endpoint information to optimize budgeting and security decisions for upgrades, change control, and other asset-related initiatives and expenses.Forms an ideal platform for asset management, software inventory and distribution, vulnerability assessment, automated malware defense, compliance and policy enforcement, power conservation and patch management—without compromising network performance or end-user productivity
With convergence of technologies, rapid innovations and the rising complexity of devices, the electronics industry needs a high level of patch and endpoint compliance without impacting the end user without major infrastructure investment - Advance Threat ProtectionBig data, cloud and mobile device are pressurizing the network but consumer satisfaction demands 24x7 network availability and good performance - Manage Endpoint in Dynamic NetworkIn case of security outrage confidential data needs to be protected at all the endpoint quickly, ensuring security compliance of Mobiles and BYOD is very essential as they access sensitive data of manufacturing units as well as supply chain elements - Mobile Enterprise and SecurityIBM endpoint solution is a one stop solution that not only shows ROI within days of implementation but also ensures regulatory compliance that can be reported and showcased in audits. - Compliance and Cost
IBM has helped electronics companies like Toshiba and A Large Semiconductor Manufacturer from Thailand to bring in efficiency and cost reduction by managing all their endpoints on a single integrated platform. Toshiba CorpBusiness challenge: Toshiba has always been promoting use of environmentally-friendly PCs with a high-level of security, and announced the launch of a low-energy and low-power PC. At the same time, Toshiba has been looking for a solution to enable across-the-board security management of PCs and energy-saving in order to satisfy market demand.Solution: The Endpoint management enabled “across-the-board security-rich operation management through the interconnection of PC hardware and TEM server” and “across-the-board measurement and management of energy consumption of PCs”.Incorporating this solution to business PCs helped increase the security of business PCs by helping to prevent unexpected security incidents, while sustaining operational productivity of individuals to achieve both a high-level of security and energy-savings across the whole company.Benefits: The application of this solution to business PCs enables Toshiba to maintain a security-rich environment to help prevent unexpected security incidents while sustaining operational productivity of the individuals to achieve across-the-board security enhancement and energy-saving. This solution offers the following specific benefits:1. Integrated management of IT and security and reduction of operational burden and cost through simple management:Offers various security features, including patch management, asset management, vulnerabilities management and virus countermeasures, and allows integration of server groups and agents that increase in number as the volume of managed data increases, to reduce operational burden and costs through simple management.2. Enables optimized management by minimizing impact on end users:Limits usage rate of agent’s resource for patch application and for collecting configuration information to enable optimized management by minimizing impact on end users.3. Real-time collection of reliable information:Incorporates policy into the agent which complies with internal compliance standard. Agent notifies the server when security violation was detected or notifies the difference when configuration information was changed to the administrator to allow client management based on always up-to-date information. For more information on the Toshiba's success story, refer to: http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/ecm/dd/0crdd-8kb9dd/nfd/index.htmlA Semiconductor Manufacturer, Thailand:Business challenge: The client relied on an alternate endpoint-management solution from another company to oversee endpoint and system management. The company found this solution inefficient, however, and ill-suited to meet its growing business needs. This solution required 100 percent CPU usage to run individual business processes, such as inventory management, leaving zero available bandwidth with which to run other applications. The company could not run multiple processes simultaneously, which slowed overall productivity.The client also lacked a centralized platform for device and application management and a centralized view into systems operations, preventing managers from effectively monitoring endpoints. The company also wanted to improve its ability to quickly and more effectively resolve system errors.Thus they sought a more efficient endpoint- and lifecycle-management solution, capable of providing a centralized view into all endpoints - physical, fixed or mobile. The company also wanted the solution to provide enhanced asset-discovery, inventory and patch management; improved software distribution; and heightened operating system (OS) deployment capabilities.Solution: The client used the Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Lifecycle Management software to create a centralized and automated lifecycle- and endpoint-management platform to support all internal assets, including desktop PCs and laptops. The solution is easily customizable, providing the flexibility needed to support the client’s constantly changing needs. The client uses many of the Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Lifecycle Management software's capabilities, including asset discovery and inventory functions, patch-management features, software-asset-management components and OS deployment functions.Benefits: By replacing its inadequate solution with IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Lifecycle Management software, the client streamlined several business processes, such as asset discovery and inventory, to improve overall efficiency and increase productivity. Using the centralized asset-management platform, the client's management team gained a single view into all business processes, assets and endpoints, making it easier to monitor system operations and identify and resolve disruptions to system performance. The Tivoli solution requires an average of less than 2 percent CPU usage - 98 percent less than that needed by the previous solution - allowing the client to run vastly more processes simultaneously and further improving productivity.By using the Tivoli software, the client can more easily maintain service levels and IT staff can focus more on critical issues and customer service, rather than basic processes. The solution also allows the client to run and manage more endpoints from a single server and platform, saving costs and simplifying manageability. In addition, the client can run patch-management processes in a matter of hours as opposed to days and can check its inventory on an as-needed basis. With the solution, the client reduced its total cost of ownership (TCO) and increased its ROI.For more information on the Semiconductor Manufacturer, Thailand: success story, refer to: http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/ecm/ak/0crdd-8uknak/nfd/index.html
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