Challenge
But it wasn’t always easy, breezy, or pretty. Previously, the city’s widespread IT team faced frustrating and unique challenges:
- Patch management was painfully manual, time-consuming, and unreliable. Testing patches and preparing them for deployment could take up to 72 hours.
- Vulnerability scanning was a multi-step, manual process that could take up to one full day per week.
- There were 8-10 separate and disjointed tools for patching, software deployment, vulnerability assessment, remote management, asset tracking, and reporting.
- Departmental teams worked in silos, with poor visibility and limited ability to collaborate.
- Consistently meeting PCI, NIST, and HIPAA compliance standards across thousands of different endpoints was woefully labor-intensive.
- Hosting six NFL AFC Championship games, three Super Bowl parades, and an MLB World Series in the last ten years required setting up an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) that operated off the city’s servers. The IT team previously relied on inefficient manual intervention to ensure maximum uptime for high-profile, citywide events.
Solution: Why Kansas City Chose NinjaOne
Searching for better leads to a blessing in disguise
That “something” was NinjaOne, a powerful, all-in-one endpoint management platform. “Our patching pain ended up being a blessing in disguise because it led us to NinjaOne,” said Perryman. “NinjaOne didn’t just consolidate our tech stack, it unified our previously siloed departments across the city. NinjaOne enables collaboration and camaraderie we simply didn’t have before.” NinjaOne replaced the 8-10 tools Kansas City previously used for patching, 3rd-party patching, software deployment, vulnerability assessment, remote management, asset tracking and reporting.
Results & Outcomes
After implementing NinjaOne, Kansas City’s IT team received instant value:
- Unified and enabled collaboration amongst IT teams throughout the city
- Enhanced workplace happiness with better, simpler tools
- Wiped $200,000+ from the IT line on the city’s P&L thanks to efficiency gains and stack consolidation
- Unlocked unparalleled visibility by managing and monitoring 5,000+ endpoints in a single pane of glass
- Eliminated the need for manual, on-site tech visits thanks to NinjaOne’s remote tools
- Streamlined compliance with essential security frameworks
- Eliminated patching pain with industry-leading NinjaOne Autonomous Patch Management
- Enabling dynamic vulnerability data importing saves one day per week
- Patch Intelligence AI instantly prioritizes reliable patches, saving time and nearly eliminating operational disruptions created from deploying bad patches
- Ensured maximum uptime of EOC for massive events like the NFL AFC Championship game and Super Bowl parade
“NinjaOne cut all the inefficiency out of the picture. The unified, all-in-one platform gives us unparalleled visibility; it saves us countless hours and has increased our productivity tenfold. It easily makes us 35-50% more efficient,” enthused Perryman.
Game-changing autonomy
Before Kansas City switched to NinjaOne, manual and multi-tool patching workflows would consume the team’s time and energy. The vulnerability scanning and remediation process alone was multi-step, involved several scripts, and relied on a homegrown, manually updated database. The laborious process could take one full day per week. That, coupled with a patching process that required time-consuming tests, led to unreliable and inconsistent patching across environments and made the audit and compliance process miserable. “NinjaOne Autonomous Patch Management is one of the biggest reasons why we went with NinjaOne as a whole,” reflected Perryman.
NinjaOne Autonomous Patch Management leverages CVE/CVSS-based risk scoring, real-time software inventory, integrated vulnerability scanner data, and proprietary Patch Intelligence AI to automate and streamline patching. Fully integrated vulnerability scanners allow the city’s IT team to gain insight into vulnerabilities and prioritize the most critical patches almost instantaneously. After an initial one-time API configuration, vulnerability data, including CVE and CVSS information, is pulled into NinjaOne dynamically and continuously and mapped to assets. Meanwhile, Patch Intelligence AI ensures operational stability by evaluating real-world patch application. It continuously monitors telemetry, social sentiment, and vendor feedback to detect problematic updates and automatically pauses or excludes problematic patches. This alone is an enormous time saver, nearly eliminating the deployment of bad updates to applications that would then require investigation, uninstall and reinstall.
