If you live in the United States, there’s a 50% chance your neighborhood is home to a Mueller fire hydrant. With any organization of Mueller’s size and breadth, the natural question for IT teams is, “How can we secure our company and our endpoints?”.
MUELLER OBJECTIVES
Brent Dukes, Director of Information Security at Mueller Water, set out to create a lean, world-class IT team. Dukes’s first order of business was to reorganize the department for hyper-efficiency.
Before finding Automox, Mueller worked to solve the following puzzles:
Complete visibility
Mueller needed a simple way to manage patches and track which software was on what machine.
Quicker responses to vulnerabilities
Technicians in the field with their endpoints needed to stay connected, even if they weren’t using a VPN.
LIFE WITH AUTOMOX
Mueller partners with Automox due to the impactful return on their investment. Dukes reported the affordable price of the platform and its available features set Automox apart from competitors.
Automated, Visible Patching
Before Automox, Mueller frequently audited and inventoried its environment, taking time out of the team’s workdays to assess their changing environment. But with Automox’s dashboards and reporting features, they could suddenly see which patches were effective and what was installed on each machine. Now, patching things like third-party software is entirely automated and works within the team’s time windows. Today, the team just pulls a report to see proof.
Running Groups of Endpoints
The ability to run groups of endpoints has been a game-changer for Mueller.
As a manufacturing business, they have many types of machines from typical office computers, servers, servers in the cloud,customer-facing web servers, and operational technologies. Categorizing things into groups works well for different response and review times.
“This has become a best practice for us. The organization leads to time savings in touching our endpoints. Having one tool to handle endpoint detection for macOS to Linux has been a game-changer.”
- Brent Dukes, Director of Information Security at Mueller Water
Remediating the Infamous Log4j Vulnerability
In 2021, a Log4j vulnerability was found in Java applications. During the week of December 25, there was a new vulnerability found each day.
Through Automox Worklets, Mueller scanned each of their endpoints, located the affected devices, and ran patches to temporarily remediate the issue. Thus, the team was able to celebrate holidays with their families, reassured their environment remained secure.
MUELLER DEVELOPS A WORLD-CLASS IT TEAM
With Automox, Mueller created a well-organized and responsive IT team. The team bettered its response time to remediation and designed preventive measures to ensure that its organization is always secured.
