The City of Beaumont’s Information Technology division provides the city’s operating departments with technical support and the software and hardware – from workstations, remote devices, and police car Mobile Digital Communicators (MDCs) – to efficiently deliver services to the public.
Check out the Heroes of IT podcast with Beaumont Chief Technical Officer, Angela Wright.
CHALLENGES BEFORE AUTOMOX
Beaumont’s IT Division Manager, Angela Wright, heads a team of 17 ITOps professionals. She started as a Project Manager for Beaumont, building up to Senior Project Manager and ultimately her current role. Today, her team manages all of the servers, computer hardware, and software for Beaumont.
Before finding Automox, Beaumont struggled with:
A lack of trust that devices were patched.
Initially, Beaumont used two separate products to address the pain points Automox solves. Even though they used two products, they often found computers still were not getting updated at all – in fact, some were years out of date.Cybersecurity concerns kept the staff up at night.
Before using Automox, the state of cybersecurity kept Angela and her team up at night. She went so far as to say that her concerns over potential cyber threats were making her stomach hurt.
"What I’ve told colleagues looking for an endpoint management system was that it just works. Even if you only applied the base policies to set Automox up, it just works. There’s so much more you can do with it – it’s fantastic. I’m over-the-moon-happy about it. The fact that I have a system I can trust that ‘just works’ is amazing."
// Angela Wright, IT Division Manager, City of Beaumont
LIFE WITH AUTOMOX
Given the mounting number of critical vulnerabilities in today’s security landscape, Beaumont’s staff knew they needed a solution they could trust. They put their feelers out and evaluated several different products. Upon trialing Automox, Angela’s team knew which solution they wanted to choose.
Fast Time to Value for Over 100 Machines
Beaumont loved the Automox free trial. They were thrilled that they could try the product out for a significant amount of time on a large number of devices without a VPN connection. Angela said, “Automox just worked – even with minimal configuration. We saw the product’s value, immediately.”
Easy to Use – You Never Have to Leave the Console
When asked what was the one feature she couldn’t live without, Angela said she loves the functionality she gets directly from the device list and never having to leave the console.
Angela said, “I can go to the device list, select a bunch of devices, and reboot them, for example. There’s a handful of things I can do straight from the device list without having to do anything else, which is nice. I can just go to that group, tell it what action to take, and I’m good.”
Unparalleled Account Support & Supercharged Confidence from Day 1
With Automox deployed across their environment, Beaumont worked directly with their Automox account manager to address issues they were having with getting their people to reboot devices. After a couple of sessions and learning to tweak their settings, the problem was fixed. Angela also mentioned her team was able to update or fix devices without needing to interrupt user productivity – a big plus.
And when one of Angela’s team leads left, she contacted her Automox account manager to train her entire department to bridge the gap. The time to value was immediate. In under 24 hours, Beaumont’s IT division got Automox deployed, trained on the platform, and fully up to speed.
"I became proficient that same day. We built our current policies as a part of that training session. I felt confident we had our base policies set that first day."
// Angela Wright, IT Division Manager, City of Beaumont
Now, whenever Angela has questions, she reaches out and gets a comprehensive, fast response from the Automox team. That’s important because Beaumont’s not just updating parking meters. Beaumont uses Automox to update their police car MDCs. These emergency devices must be updated and patched at all times – there’s no room to fail. They now rely on Automox to have confidence that all their endpoints are up to date and secured, always.
