The San Francisco Bay Area is home to some of the world’s best universities, and Stanford University may be one the most well-known, in addition to enjoying some of the highest national rankings academically.

Stanford has a reputation for attracting the best and the brightest, both in terms of students and faculty. That quest for excellence also extends to IT staff since an intellectually powerful campus makes for intellectually demanding IT needs.

Added to that, Stanford is a leader in academic research, meaning the IT department must ensure the safety of data and research that could potentially be worth millions on the open market. That also makes the school a prime target for eager and sophisticated cybercriminals.

How Stanford Stays at the Head of the Class

At IBM InterConnect 2016, Stanford shared how IBM BigFix helps position the school to safeguard critically important data and serve a diverse set of internal clients with ease.

IBM BigFix has been part of the Stanford IT Department for almost a dozen years, according to Stacy Lee, a security operations specialist. “IBM BigFix consistently delivers robust security in addition to high performance,” said Lee.

“Those are important qualities for us since we know we’re safeguarding not just the personal data of students, staff and faculty, but also potentially research results that can alter the path of how we understand things like science,” he added. “Protecting our data matters — not just to the university, but in many cases also to society. It’s a job we take seriously.”

Stacy Lee and Jeremy Tavan of Stanford University are joined by Steve Hull of IBM for their IBM InterConnect 2016 session in Las Vegas.

IBM BigFix Offers the Comprehensive Security Solution

IBM BigFix is the solution of choice to help Lee and team maintain security for more than 65,000 endpoints and roughly 500 servers. The product, with its flexibility and ease of use, enabled them to implement some additional security measures that would have been more complex had they not had BigFix installed, including two-factor authentication and enhanced compliance reporting.

“We use IBM BigFix whenever we have gaps in management between tools or when we need help rolling out new tools,” said Lee at a standing-room-only breakout session at InterConnect. “It’s flexible, so it helps us manage other security tools that are more unwieldy, yet it’s also highly secure.”

“That’s a combination that helps us, as an IT team, rise above the fray,” Lee stated.

Learn more about how IBM BigFix can help your organization find, fix and secure endpoints fast — and rank best-of-class while doing it.