Configuresoft Serves Up Security and Compliance Success at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers.

ECM Automates Server and Workstation Configuration Management, Saves Time, Ensures Clean Audits

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, a casual dining restaurant chain with more than 325 locations across the United States and Canada, needed to update its 250+ servers and workstations, analyze security vulnerabilities and tackle compliance challenges in a disparate IT infrastructure. A Configuresoft Rapid Security Configuration Assessment (RSCA) team deployed Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) to collect security data from servers and workstations, develop an action plan to fix existing problems and create best practices to prevent reoccurrences.

"We are famous for offering a wide array of gourmet burgers, bottomless steak fries and unique beverages, but we needed assistance in securing our corporate data and ensuring compliance to regulatory mandates for Sarbanes-Oxley. We must maintain consistent, secure and compliant configurations," said Bill Randall, director of IT at Red Robin. "Within hours of the RSCA engagement, Configuresoft highlighted security patches that were initially thought to be deployed, but instead were not. We recognized the value of RSCA immediately."

Configuresoft experts quickly and accurately evaluated the configuration quality of the system configurations of servers and workstations. They provided assessment reports that gave management critical information regarding the security of their environment and how these systems comply with best practices and standards. Additionally, the RSCA review provided a valuable snapshot of the state of the IT environment and suggested methods of improvement.

"Since ECM is designed by working auditors, Configuresoft's Compliance Toolkits have given Red Robin a comprehensive series of automated checks and controls to correlate with compliance requirements and give the auditors one user-friendly report, providing visibility at the CIO level," said Andrew Bird, vice president at Configuresoft. "Red Robin can enforce security policies without human intervention by automatically resetting configurations to their pre-defined standard when they are inadvertently changed."

Maintaining an accurate inventory of software deployed on Windows based machines was a time consuming task, requiring that Red Robin engineers spend several days collecting information from the machines on the network and compiling all of the data. Using the information gathered by ECM and stored in the configuration management database (CMDB), systems administrators can generate an accurate inventory of software for licensing within hours. They can also monitor the software that is installed on the network and quickly identify and remove unauthorized software applications.

The company also uses Configuresoft to update passwords for service accounts in less than an hour, a task that once took 10-15 hours.

"Our goal was to change administrative service accounts that ran across the entire enterprise, a process that historically took us two days," said Randall. "Using ECM, we can do the same process in less than an hour. We know that all of the approved updates have been made correctly, and we can keep up with Microsoft security patches."

Now, as Red Robin continues to open new locations across the United States, the company is confident that its servers and workstations are secure and are meeting compliance mandates.

About Configuresoft

Configuresoft is an innovator in systems management technology, ensuring continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations across today's heterogeneous computing infrastructures. Spanning both security and operations, the Company's configuration management, compliance and remediation products are used by 12 of the world's 25 largest companies to keep their critical systems properly configured, while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, FISMA, GLBA, Basel II, HIPAA and DISA, and industry standards such as ISO 17799, PCI DSS and Microsoft Security Hardening Guides. To contact Configuresoft, please call (888) U-CONFIG or visit www.configuresoft.com.