Tax Tech: Making PC support less taxing

Tax Tech, Inc. assists small loan companies in preparing tax returns and electronic filing for their customers. Loan companies benefit from Tax Tech’s expertise to help serve their customers during the traditional off-peak season of January and February. Tax Tech trains loan office personnel and provides support to ensure professional tax preparation services are available to their customers.

Gaining control over PCs
Tax Tech supports over 1,000 customer offices in 11 states and is growing at more than 10 percent per year. The company provides a full range of PC lifecycle services—from acquisition to operating system installation, as well as specialty software installation, on-going maintenance and help desk support. Control over the desktop is further complicated by the fact that while Tax Tech owns the hardware, it is leased to customers who purchase all the software for those PCs—including any IT management software.

With a highly geographically disbursed customer base, each branch location has only a few end users and no IT staff, but requires nearly 100 percent uptime—especially during tax season. This resulted in an expensive and inefficient process where Tax Tech would frequently send out replacement PCs whenever a patch couldn’t be installed or an issue couldn’t be resolved over the phone quickly. Prior to implementing an endpoint management solution based on BigFix® technology, this required Tax Tech to reallocate approximately 20 people for monthly patch updates. This also caused customers to have a longer-than-desired window of vulnerability.

Tax Tech was originally looking to replace CA eTrust because it did not meet its needs for managing over VPN connections and its inability to use the autoscan feature due to impact on PC performance. This left its customers’ endpoints fairly vulnerable and generated a large volume of help desk calls and returned PCs. During the search process, Tax Tech discovered that BigFix technology (now IBM® Tivoli® Endpoint Manager) could manage across many different types of network connections and address the company’s needs beyond antivirus, causing a shift in project goals to improve patch management immediately and address antivirus protection later.

Solving problems in minutes
In 2008, Tax Tech implemented BigFix technology (now IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager) to greatly reduce the effort required for distributing software updates and security patches. Through the solution, Tax Tech has eliminated the need for borrowing internal resources the week of “Patch Tuesday”—the second Tuesday of every month when Microsoft® releases patches for its software. These extra staff members would be needed to call each user and walk them through the software update process.

“The ability to deploy our own software and have granular restart controls to schedule for off hours is invaluable,” says Mike Morse, Director of IT, Tax Tech. “We can make sure that not only are Microsoft patches fully implemented, but also that software updates for the specialized tax software our customers use are fully implemented, without impacting the end user.”

Tax Tech is also using Tivoli Endpoint Manager to protect its customers from malware. In particular, the software’s ability to centrally manage antimalware even when a majority of computers are accessed through a VPN connection was a must-have capability.

One of the benefits Tax Tech had not expected was how the solution would help its customers with their compliance efforts. Tax Tech’s main customer was audited by its bank, which initially resulted in numerous calls to Tax Tech. During these calls, Tax Tech explained to the auditors what was being provided to the branch locations, the patch and endpoint protection processes, and general PC support efforts. Once the auditor heard how Tax Tech was handling endpoint management, the response was “great” and there were no more calls.

Morse has also come to appreciate the value of the platform itself, describing Tivoli Endpoint Manager, built on BigFix technology, as “My IT army. It’s just too easy; the only thing you are limited by is your creativity.” He uses custom content to investigate and address unexpected issues as well as delivering targeted communications to his customers covering a wide range of topics—from “call me when you have time to address your IT issue” to “changes in the tax law require that you now check box ‘x’ in your tax software when preparing returns”. The flexibility and visibility provided by Tivoli Endpoint Manager solves problems in minutes rather than days and has reduced call volume from 80 - 100 calls per day down to fewer than 20, despite a 400 percent growth in the number of endpoints supported from 2006 to 2009.

Tax Tech continues to experience strong growth of 100 - 150 branches per year, and is using Tivoli Endpoint Manager to enable that growth without creating a burden for the IT team or the need to add new staff.

Supporting 900 endpoints in only three days
The initial deployment took three days for approximately 900 endpoints. Due to the lack of direct connectivity with end-user machines (all connectivity must be initiated by the user), Tax Tech chose to post the Microsoft Installer Package (MSI) on a protected area of its website and sent instructions to customers to download the package via email. Installation of the agent by the end users was accomplished without any issues.

With the solution’s management capabilities and low agent impact, Morse can enable Trend Micro antimalware to run all the time (unlike with the company’s previous implementation) without complaint from customers. But, he also enjoys the ability to reliably perform extra thorough scans on Sunday to proactively fix any systems that weren’t automatically quarantined and fixed.

Tax Tech supports over 1,000 branch locations with 1 - 10 PCs per branch. This requires Tax Tech to support its customers primarily over the Internet using a relay in its demilitarized zone (DMZ). Enabling those endpoints to receive patches and antivirus signature updates either from Tax Tech or directly from the vendor has also greatly enhanced scalability. “We didn’t have the bandwidth or server capacity to pump out 200 - 300 copies of Microsoft SP2 [Service Pack 2], but thanks to the software’s relay architecture and direct-from-Microsoft download capabilities, we were able to update all of our customers’ endpoints in just hours rather than extending their exposure window with a gradual rollout,” says Morse.

Even though Tax Tech cannot perform any changes during the day—especially during tax season—thanks to Tivoli Endpoint Manager, built on BigFix technology, IT staff can work normal hours, scheduling maintenance and updates to execute overnight and not worry about whether it will be fixed by the next morning. “Everything I do is at night, but the software keeps me from working nights,” says Morse. This makes his family big fans of the solution as well.

Looking ahead
Tax Tech is now considering offering their customers power management capabilities through Tivoli Endpoint Manager, but the company must first shrink the nightly maintenance window as there are typically only about two hours each night when the computer isn’t being used for back ups and other maintenance. As Morse continues to explore the power of Tivoli Endpoint Manager, he should be able to reduce the nightly maintenance window, making power management another service he can offer his customers.

In addition, Tax Tech is currently managing endpoint configurations using the basic platform capabilities, but would like to add the prebuilt content, exception management, and compliance dashboard as well.

Solution components
Software

• IBM® Tivoli® Endpoint Manager, built on BigFix® technology

For more information

To learn more about IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager, built on BigFix technology, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/tivoli/endpoint

You can get even more out of Tivoli software by participating in independently run Tivoli User Groups around the world. Learn about opportunities near you at: www.tivoli-ug.org

For more information on Tax Tech, Inc. visit: www.taxtechinc.com