The Challenge
carwow has 400+ employees worldwide. Because of the company’s hybrid work model, many of its endpoints are now remote most or all of the time. As a result, carwow’s IT team faced the challenge of keeping all devices in line with Microsoft’s security baseline and promptly remediating any settings that failed to match the recommended configuration. One of their most important concerns was ensuring that no users have local administrator rights on their devices, since exploiting administrator rights is a primary method that attackers use to gain control of machines and deploy malware.
With their current mobile device management (MDM) system, Intune, the IT team couldn’t automatically enforce these important security policy settings for remote devices. Instead, they had to perform all necessary fixes manually, which was time consuming and labor intensive. “That’s why we started looking for a cost-effective tool that would give us visibility into endpoint configurations and a way to remediate settings that deviate from policy in a more streamlined manner,” explains Luke Wolfenden, Lead IT Engineer at carwow. “Otherwise, we would have had to move to a different MDM system that was seven times more expensive than Intune.”
The Action1 Solution
Luke reviewed several tools and chose Action1 because it addresses his company’s needs perfectly and complements his MDM tool by providing what it lacked. In particular, he appreciates that Action1 is a cloud-native platform, offers customizable reporting, and enables him to easily push scripts to remote endpoints. Moreover, Action1 provides features he did not expect to get, such as policy-based deployment of software and updates. “Finally, the 100-endpoints-for-free-offering was very convenient as it allowed us to deploy the platform on a representative number of devices to ensure it would work well for us,” adds Luke.
The Benefits
Automated enforcement of IT security policies. Action1 custom reports provide Luke and his team with actionable information about the state of their endpoints, including their adherence to security baselines. Luke particularly appreciates that the platform alerts him when a particular device is out of policy and automatically remediates the problem, without him having to check and fix each device manually. “We built a report to find computers that have local admin rights granted to unauthorized accounts, and we receive an update on this every day. When such devices are detected, we assign them to a policy-based PowerShell script that removes local admin rights from these users,” says Luke. “Action1 slashed the time to bring our environment in line with this critical security baseline from 6 hours a week to just 20 minutes a week, which is 18 times faster than our previous approach.”
Action1 slashed times to bring our environment in line with our IT security policies from 6 hours a week to just 20 minutes a week, which is 18 times faster than with our previous approach.
Streamlined remote IT management. In addition to providing reporting and automated remediation, Action1 helps Luke and his team manage endpoints in ways that their MDM system does not cover. In particular, they can automatically deploy printers, remove specific applications, and deploy Windows feature updates. “For example, we used Action1 to uninstall our old MDM client from some of our older devices; the platform was also very helpful when we had to deploy Windows 11 on a certain group of devices,” says Luke. “I appreciate how easy it was to perform all these tasks.”
