The BES Technology Training Guide describes the various training program tracks that are available for the BigFix Enterprise Suite (BES) from BigFix®, Inc. It includes a complete description of the individual classes, as well as program layout to determine what type of IT Administrator should be taking with program tracks.  This guide doesn’t, however, discuss the installation of the software. For that information, see the BES Administrator’s Guide or the BES Evaluation Guide. 

G4 Technology Partner’s mission is to provide the knowledge and skills needed to use BigFix effectively and efficiently.

We are now 100% Virtual Training! Take the same classes from the comfort of your office or home-office with all the same fun and interaction with out incurring high expenses for travel!

 For optimal results, we employ instructor-led presentations and hands-on laboratory exercises.  We offer both private and public training.

 There are currently four generalized curriculums regarding BigFix Bes Technology.  Click HERE to download the new schedule.  Each class registration fee is just $500 per person per class and includes all your printed materials mailed right to your doorstep. Discounts are available to multiple students of a single company.

 INTRODUCTION TO BIGFIX (BigFix-101)
February 25th ; May 20th
1 Day Technical Training; Hands-on Lab Environment
Prerequisites: None

The BigFix Enterprise Suite platform provides a robust and powerful framework for managing large, heterogeneous groups of computers. Day to day operations tasks utilizing the BigFix Enterprise Suite are carried out by Console Operators. Generally, these duties revolve around using BES to manage and report on specific groups of computers within an enterprise. The BigFix Enterprise Suite Basic Training Course trains new Console Operators with little or no prior exposure to BES. . Through a combination of instructorled lectures and hands-on exercises, students will gain exposure to tools, skills, and techniques that will help them to effectively perform these day to day tasks using the BES Console

1. Advanced Solution Development (BES202: July 1st)

Rolling out a security patch or a software update can be accomplished in minutes, allowing you to keep a step ahead of potential network problems while maintaining a standardized operating environment. You can track the progress of each computer as updates are applied, making it easy to gauge the level of compliance across your entire enterprise.

BES allows you to create and print an audit trail of each issue and its resolution to meet regulatory or policy guidelines. At any time and from any browser, you can view or print graphs and reports summarizing conditions across hundreds of thousands of networked computers.

Using an exhaustive library of Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux Inspectors, BES can retrieve useful computer properties from each of the BES Clients. These properties can be used to target your own Fixlet messages, tasks and actions. You can also use these retrieved properties to generate customized, continuously updated reports, graphs and 3D maps of your network.

BigFix’s patented technology distributes computing power to the devices themselves, using the intelligent BigFix Agent to provide a level of visibility and control not possible in legacy solutions. This level of innovation translates into significant advantages in speed, flexibility, and scalability, while reducing the infrastructure and training costs associated with traditional systems and security management.

How Does It Work?

•  The BigFix Console is the command center from which information on the state of all network computers can be viewed and policies can be defined in real time.
  
• BigFix Policies, also known as Fixlet Messages®, communicate policy information between BigFix Agents and BigFix Server environments. BigFix Policy Messages can contain logical criteria to trigger specific actions—for example, “if vulnerability X exists on this client, update software module Y with the appropriate package.” Customers can use BigFix-provided policies or customize their own.
  
• BigFix Relays provide distributed points of communication, aggregation and staging for BigFix Policy Messages and patch/remediation content. They help reduce network bandwidth requirements and provide added fault-tolerance to BigFix-based management systems. BigFix Relays can be installed on existing hardware, including desktops and multi-purpose systems such as file or print servers. No dedicated hardware is required, and deployment takes minutes rather than months without disruptive network configuration changes.

 Managing the “care and feeding” of hundreds of thousands of network devices presents a formidable task for IT organizations. Even a simple question such as, “How many computers do you have?” can generate a variety of responses. Most organizations struggle with these basic questions about their computing environment:

• How do you set up specific endpoints to meet a certain security configuration?
• How do you ensure that users within a certain role are running the correct version of an application?
• How do you deploy patches in a way that minimizes downtime?

The ideal solution provides centralized, automated—yet easily customizable—lifecycle management of all the assets on your network. BigFix Systems Lifecycle Management brings BigFix cost-savings and operational excellence to key IT operations management functions including asset discovery/inventory, patch management, power management, remote desktop, software distribution, software asset management, and OS deployment. Consolidating and streamlining the most common IT operational tasks, BigFix delivers the highest levels of automation combined with fine-grained accuracy, enabling IT departments to maintain service levels, focus on critical issues, and ensure overall operating efficiency.

 Watch the Chalk Talk on Systems Lifecycle Management!

Listen to Jonathan Fan (Senior Director of Product Management at BigFix) explain how you can manage all your assets – fixed and mobile, across platforms – at every stage.

Product Benefits

• Consolidate and simplify key system management services enterprise-wide
• Gain real-time visibility into endpoint configurations across the enterprise
• Enjoy immediate ROROI through power management, software license true- ups, and asset discovery, in addition to longer-term ROROI through resource reduction (up to 80% for labor requirements), server consolidation (up to a 40:1 ratio), and proven operational efficiencies
• Enable autodiscovery of unmanaged assets
• Scale from 1,000 to up to 250,000 endpoints on a single server
• Collapse software update cycles from weeks and months to hours and days
• Transparently manage mobile computers whether connected to the network or not
• Obtain closed-loop confirmation not just that a change command was  acknowledged by an endpoint, but whether the change was/was not successfully implemented
• Manage heterogeneous platforms—Windows, Mac, UNIX, Linux running on physical or virtual machines
• Take advantage of “instant on” functionality without additional software or hardware
• Reduce the clutter and expense of multi-vendor tool sets
• Lower staff learning curves, deepen expertise, improve operational effectiveness
• Reduce electric power costs while synchronizing energy conservation with maintenance processes

What’s Included

Systems Lifecycle Management streamlines IT operational tasks with a lightweight, single-agent, single-console framework. The suite includes the following product components:

• Asset Discovery provides visibility into all IP-enabled devices on your network.
• Asset Inventory offers deep inspection capabilities to report on hundreds of hardware and software attributes out of the box, across platforms, in real time, at massive scale.
• Patch Management collapses patch and update time scales, reduces staff workloads, cuts cost, and increases the effectiveness of patch processes.
• Power Management delivers significant energy cost savings and reduces carbon emissions through enterprise-wide desktop system power conservation. 
• Remote Control configures and manages Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance functionality.
• Software Distribution automates and adds new levels of assurance to the software deployment process. 
• Software Asset Management helps enterprises identify under-used software to manage costs, and over-used licenses to stay on the right side of software license agreements.
• OS Deployment, an optional component, provides bare-metal imaging and provisioning for operating systems.
• Device Management for Windows Mobile enables configuration, encryption, and software distribution management by optimizing the BigFix Windows Agent for the mobile platform

Why BigFix?

Powered by the real-time visibility and control of the BigFix unified management platform, BigFix Systems Lifecycle Management brings cost-savings to key IT functions critical at each stage of the systems lifecycle – for desktops, servers and roaming laptops. Consolidating and streamlining the most common IT operational tasks, BigFix delivers the highest levels of automation combined with fine-grained accuracy, enabling IT departments to maintain service levels, focus on critical issues, and ensure overall operating efficiency.

When it comes to security and vulnerability management, there’s a big difference between identifying problems and resolving them. Or better yet, preventing them. Enterprises want to protect their environments from threats. IT organizations struggle to balance security and industry compliance. How do you protect your environment? How do you report on compliance to get approval from regulators? You need a solution that provides real-time visibility and enforcement into security configurations and settings enterprise-wide. 

What’s Included

BigFix Security Configuration and Vulnerability Management (SCVM) consolidates a suite of services, including vulnerability management, automated security configuration management, and security patch management to cut costs, reduce complexity, and lower security risks.

 Watch the Chalk Talk on Security Configuration Vulnerabiltiy Management!

Listen to Jim Hansen (Senior Product Manager at BigFix) explain why Security Configuration management is so important for organizations to consider as part of their natural security risk assement routine.

Product Benefits

The product components in the BigFix SCVM suite include:

• BigFix Security Configuration Management (SCM) provides a comprehensive set of configuration settings to help IT staff achieve compliance and best practices goals through assessment and enforcement of security policies on their endpoints.
• BigFix Vulnerability Management empowers IT organizations to discover, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities at unparalleled scale and speed.
• BigFix Patch Management collapses patch and update time scales, reduces staff workloads, cuts costs, and increases the effectiveness of operating system and application patch processes.
• BigFix Asset Discovery identifies suspicious or rogue systems entering your network for proactive risk reduction and continuous policy enforcement.
• BigFix Device Control provides organizations with the ability to see, manage, modify, enforce, and report on access and usage of portable devices on all endpoints.

IT staff continue to be forced to do more with less. BigFix rises to the challenge of IT budget crunches by offering high

performance security and systems management designed for rapid time-to-value, low overhead, and optimized operations.

Speci­fically, the BigFix Unifi­ed Management Platform delivers the following cost-saving benefi­ts: real-time visibility, unprecedented

scalability, infrastructure consolidation, power management, software asset management, patch management, and security

con­figuration management.

Green IT

BigFix provides a scalable and flexible approach to computer power management, ensuring that IT can do its job and business

operations are not disrupted. BigFix Wake-on-LAN and flexible opt-in capabilities allows organizations to meet the needs of IT

staff and end users while still reducing overall energy usage by as much as 40%. Additionally, using BigFix reporting, you can get

accurate data on your energy usage, costs, and savings.

ITIL Enablement

The BigFix ITIL solution gives you a pervasive view of all assets and delivers continuous real-time assessment, remediation, and

reporting throughout the asset lifecycle. The program scales as your assets grow and provides automated policy enforcement for

both ­fixed and remote devices, allowing organizations to maintain con­figurations on the endpoint and track changes as soon as

they are made. BigFix’s unique combination of key features is vital to ensuring the success of an ITIL program.

Regulatory and Policy Compliance

Organizations can eliminate the challenges and reduce the costs associated with managing compliance by leveraging the BigFix

Uni­ed Management Platform to help increase visibility, centrally manage all endpoints, and remediate issues identifi­ed on any

managed asset. IT Operations and IT Security can leverage a unified assessment, remediation, and reporting tool to foster

communication and ensure accuracy of reporting against compliance initiatives.

Infrastructure Consolidation

For any organization, security and systems management consolidation can provide huge cost-saving rewards. Thanks to its

distributed intelligence architecture, BigFix’s Unifi­ed Management Platform is scalable from 1,000 to 250,000 endpoints with

minimal dedicated hardware requirements—one server manages up to 250,000 endpoints. BigFix administrators enjoy full

control of the computing assets at their ­fingertips, and they are typically capable of handling the work of several administrators

using traditional solutions. Regardless of the number of managed devices, with BigFix, a single FTE can manage the entire

systems and security management lifecycle.

Virtualization Management

In virtualized environments, BigFix helps organizations achieve IT security compliance by detecting and enforcing security

con­figuration policies—on both physical and virtual machines. This enables the organization to consolidate and unify the

compliance lifecycle, reducing endpoint con­figuration and remediation times from days and weeks to minutes and hours. For

patching, BigFix provides capabilities for real-time discovery, scanning, and updating of offline and online VMs.

Government

BigFix has a proven track record in providing security and IT operation solutions to government agencies. Whether it’s for a

federal civilian agency, the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community or state and local governments, BigFix has a

proven real-time situational awareness and remediation platform for all IT assets regardless of OS, location or network

connectivity status. The BigFix Unifi­ed Management Console delivers over 18 solutions for critical IT initiatives using a single

agent and console for mandates and programs

The BigFix Agent provides real-time and continuous policy processing, remediation, validation and reporting.  BigFix’s platform features minimal endpoint resources (2-4 MB of system memory) and typically around 1% CPU utilization.  Having the BigFix platform allows you to consolidate dedicated management infrastructure, reduce manual second-pass remediation and routine administration labor.

2 Hour Remote – $999

4 hour Onsite – 2,500

50% Off

Good Until Nov 30^th