Unified Management Platform

What is BigFix's Unified Management Platform?

Purpose-built for today's distributed enterprise, BigFix's Unified Management Platform provides real-time visibility and control through a single infrastructure, single agent, and unified console for systems lifecycle management, endpoint protection, and security configuration and vulnerability management. The BigFix platform is designed to continuously discover, assess, remediate, and enforce the health and security of servers, desktops, and roaming laptops in real-time via a single, policy-driven agent and single console.

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 power of the BigFix platform derives from key features that reduce cost, maximize ROI, and improve efficiency. The platform includes the following components:

The BigFix Agent is the brain of the BigFix platform. Continuously assessing the endpoint and enforcing policy regardless of connectivity, this single, multi-purpose agent represents a radical departure from legacy client-server architectures by powering a resilient distributed intelligence infrastructure.

The BigFix Server stores the real-time view of the configuration and posture of all BigFix Agents. It acts as the single point of contact to the Internet, monitoring and gathering policy content streams and distributing them to BigFix Agents.

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.