Microsoft Infrastructure OptimizationCustomer Solution Case Study

Brewery Optimizes IT Infrastructure by Merging PC and Security Management

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Consumer goods manufacturing

Customer ProfileBased in Chico, California, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company is one of the largest beer producers in the United States. With 500 employees, the company produces almost 700,000 barrels of beer a year.

Business SituationSierra Nevada wanted to streamline IT security and PC management, reduce infrastructure and management costs, and make it easier for its IT staff to safeguard and optimize the desktop environment.

SolutionSierra Nevada transitioned its multiple IT security and management environments to a single infrastructure running Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.

Benefits Simplifies PC management Improves insight into security Boosts scalability Reduces costs

“Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 fits our needs now. And, as we continue to grow, we can use it to support multiple different client configurations, no matter how big the organization gets.”

Justin Ainsworth, IT Manager, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

To help trim operating costs and pursue opportunities for continued expansion, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company needed to streamline its approach to endpoint management. The company wanted to simplify security and PC management to make it easier for IT staff to administer, update, and safeguard the desktop environment. In June 2010, Sierra Nevada consolidated its IT security and management disciplines. The company adopted Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 to replace Symantec Antivirus Enterprise Edition. By merging its PC management and security on a single infrastructure, the company has improved protection of IT assets that run the Windows operating system, reduced licensing and maintenance costs, and gained the flexibility that it needs to sustain its impressive record of growth.

SituationIn 1978, the founders of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company assembled their brew house from dairy tanks and secondhand equipment salvaged from local breweries that had gone out of business. In the 30-plus years since then, the company has experienced near constant growth. Today, Sierra Nevada is the sixth largest craft brewery in the United States. Based in Chico, California, it has 500 employees.

The company’s recipe for success includes an unwavering commitment to innovation—from its use of high-efficiency refrigeration systems to its investment in advanced heat and carbon-dioxide recovery infrastructure. The drive to conserve effort, save time, and minimize waste has long been part of the Sierra Nevada culture, and it extends to every part of the business.

Company IT leaders have applied this ethic to the acquisition and management of IT resources. As it has grown, Sierra Nevada has largely standardized on Microsoft technologies. Its investment spans core infrastructure technologies, including the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, as well as desktop solutions such as the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications.

The Sierra Nevada desktop environment consists of 250 computers at the company headquarters in Chico and 100 portable computers that field sales staffers rely on each day. The company runs the Windows 7 Enterprise operating system on approximately 40 percent of its PCs, and it runs a mix of the Windows Vista and

Windows XP operating systems on the remaining PCs. It also runs the Windows Internet Explorer 8 browser on all of these computers and recently optimized a number of its web-based business applications for use with this software. “Our goal in consolidating on a set of fully interoperable tools from Microsoft has been to drive down the cost of PC management while improving our overall security situation,” says Justin Ainsworth, IT Manager at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.

Need for Greater Efficiency in PC ManagementFor years, the company used Group Policy settings in Windows Server to manage the distribution of software to PCs. But this approach did not provide sufficient visibility into deployment success rates. “There’s not a whole lot of reporting that comes back through this method, so we often needed to redeploy packages multiple times to make sure the operation worked,” says Ainsworth. “And then we would still receive lots of calls from employees saying that an application was not running properly after we had pushed out an update, which meant a physical touch of each of those computers to solve the problem.”

Ainsworth estimates that it took his team an average of 10 minutes per PC to resolve these kinds of issues, which hampered efforts to hold down IT service costs and detracted from the team’s ability to focus on higher-level strategic objectives.

Goal to Consolidate on a Single Endpoint Protection SolutionSierra Nevada used Microsoft Forefront Client Security alongside Symantec

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Based in Chico, California, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company is one of the largest craft breweries in the United States.

Antivirus Enterprise Edition to help protect the brewery’s PCs and network infrastructure from malicious software. The IT team appreciated the familiar interface and tool set of Forefront Client Security. However, on several occasions, staffers experienced difficulties when attempting to deploy the Client Security agent to new computers.

“There were a few times when the server rebooted after installing the agent, which caused lots of headaches for our team,” says Ainsworth. “In terms of the strength of the scanning engine, the real-time alerts, and the reporting features that it offered, Forefront Client Security was great. But we found that it didn’t perform well when it came to distributing security-related updates.”

Similarly, Ainsworth and his team were mostly satisfied with their use of Symantec Antivirus, but the solution offered only limited information on the overall health of each managed computer. From the Symantec console, administrators could see the antivirus status of each computer but did not have a view of alerts, pending security updates, firewall protection status, and other important details.

Motivated by the commitment to continuous improvement—a key ingredient of the company’s approach to doing business for more than three decades—executives began looking for a way to combine desktop security and management in a single solution. “Ultimately, we saw that we were wasting valuable time and effort by using one set of tools to deploy and manage software and two overlapping tools to manage desktop

security. We knew there had to be a better, more efficient way,” says Ainsworth.

SolutionIn June 2010, through participation in an early adopter program, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company began evaluating and testing Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, the next generation of Forefront Client Security and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. By using this integrated solution, the organization can merge security and desktop management work streams into a single infrastructure, accessing threat detection and system configuration tool sets from a single console.

Rapid DeploymentAfter a successful test of the software in a lab environment, Sierra Nevada moved forward with the production implementation of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010. IT staffers used System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 to deploy the client software to the 250 desktop computers at the company’s headquarters. They were also able to deploy to computers outside the company’s main network domain and monitor the security of and distribute updates to laptops that field sales representatives use.

“Setting up the deployment literally took about a minute,” says Ainsworth. “The ability to centrally target collections of PCs in Configuration Manager made the installation process really straightforward. In about four clicks we were able to distribute the client agent to all of the PCs in our environment.”

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Single Console The IT team appreciates the ability to deploy and manage updates, and track and remediate security threats—all from a single, familiar interface. Through the unified console interface in System Center Configuration Manager, administrators can publish software and security updates, create and configure endpoint security policies, monitor system health information, and respond to attacks from malicious software and other dynamic threats.

From the centralized dashboard, the IT team can gain a holistic assessment of the health of the entire desktop environment. They can then quickly drill down to analyze such operational statistics as client deployment status, malicious software activity, and Windows Firewall protection for computer groups, as well as individual PCs. “Everything is contained in a single system and all of the data is organized in a consistent format, which means we do not have to spend time interpreting and comparing information from multiple, disparate sources. We just see it and act on it,” says Ainsworth. Precision Threat Detection Sierra Nevada uses the comprehensive endpoint security framework that the solution provides to protect against targeted threats and expose previously unknown vulnerabilities. In fact, the company immediately capitalized on the solution’s multilayered security architecture, along with its accuracy in reporting incidents with a low false positive rate, to improve its threat detection capabilities. Within minutes of installing the Forefront Endpoint Protection client

software on all of its PCs, IT staff noticed that the solution identified and removed several previously undetected viruses. “It caught network-layer viruses that had existed on our systems for years and were never discovered before,” says Ainsworth.

Interoperability with Existing InfrastructureOne of the main reasons that Sierra Nevada made the move to Forefront Endpoint Protection was to take advantage of enhanced interoperability with and protection of the company’s existing Microsoft software investments. The IT staff now uses predefined security policies for business-critical systems such as Microsoft SQL Server data management software and Microsoft Exchange Server messaging software.

“Without predefined policies, we would have had to research and create custom policies for each system,” says Ainsworth. “For instance, we would have had to add exclusions for database files in SQL Server or for folders in Exchange Server that we don’t want the antivirus engine to interfere with. The use of predefined policies probably saved us a full day on the deployment.”

BenefitsBy merging its desktop management and security functions in a single solution, Sierra Nevada has reduced infrastructure and licensing costs, simplified PC management, and optimized protection of its server and desktop assets.

Strengthens Server and Desktop Security By adopting Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, Sierra Nevada was able to completely

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“Everything is contained in a single system and all of the data is organized in a consistent format, which means we do not have to spend time interpreting and comparing information from multiple, disparate sources. We just see it and act on it.”

Justin Ainsworth, IT Manager, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

replace Symantec Antivirus Enterprise Edition. IT staff rely on the multilayered threat detection capabilities of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010—including virus protection, system behavior monitoring, and Windows Firewall management—to gain deep insight into the security status of the company’s entire PC environment. “We now have a better overall picture of each PC and how it is protected,” says Ainsworth. “With Symantec, we were getting only antivirus status. Now we can see the endpoint as a whole, including firewall status, software updates, and antivirus status. The improved visibility gives me peace of mind.”

Ainsworth also notes the strategic benefit of standardizing on a Microsoft technology solution to unify desktop and security management. “We not only eliminate the need to license a separate solution, but we also gain access to security functionality that is tailored to our existing systems,” he says. “This will help us maximize the return on our investment in Microsoft software.”

Increases IT EfficiencyThrough the use of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 and System Center Configuration Manager, Sierra Nevada gains more reliable and efficient software distribution capabilities and advanced security features—all combined in a single infrastructure. From the centralized console in Configuration Manager, Ainsworth’s team can publish updates, configure security policies, and access summary and detailed system health reports. “It is simple math: the fewer screens you have to check, the more efficient you can be at handling both sets of tasks,” says Ainsworth.

By giving IT staff access to consolidated management and security tools, Sierra Nevada has reduced the time needed for such tasks as deploying updates. “Our timekeeping software uses a Java plug-in, and recently Java issued a required update of the software,” says Ainsworth. “We rolled it out to every PC from the System Center Configuration Manager console. Before, a technician would have had to physically touch all 250 computers. At 10 minutes per PC, it would have taken us a week to complete.”

Boost Flexibility and Scalability for the FutureAs a successful, dynamic enterprise, Sierra Nevada expects to continue growing. With Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, the company gained a highly flexible and scalable solution for desktop management and security. It can take advantage of numerous deployment options to provide first-class protection to both domain-joined PCs and the disconnected laptop computers that mobile workers use. Because System Center Configuration Manager can scale to manage hundreds of thousands of clients, the company can pursue an aggressive growth strategy without worrying about replacing its endpoint protection solution.

“Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 fits our needs now. And, as we continue to grow, we can use it to support multiple different client configurations, no matter how big the organization gets,” says Ainsworth. “That’s what I call technology supporting innovation.”

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“With Symantec, we were getting only antivirus status. Now we can see the endpoint as a whole, including firewall status, software updates, and antivirus status. The improved visibility gives me peace of mind.”

Justin Ainsworth, IT Manager, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

Microsoft Infrastructure OptimizationWith infrastructure optimization, you can build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Infrastructure Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Infrastructure Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.

For more information about Microsoft infrastructure optimization, go to:www.microsoft.com/io

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Sierra Nevada Brewing Company products and services, call (530) 893-3520 or visit the website at:www.sierranevada.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published May 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft Forefront Endpoint

Protection 2010− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007 R2