Mellon Financial Corp. has improved its data security and made its system more efficient by upgrading its software-patch management, an executive said.
The Pittsburgh banking company switched last year to a tool kit from Altiris Inc. of Lindon, Utah, which was acquired in April by Symantec Corp., said Dennis G. Smith, a first vice president at Mellon who works in its infrastructure engineering unit.
Mellon had been using the Systems Management Server from Microsoft Corp. for eight years.
Mellon has an eight-member team that does nothing but apply software patches to desktop computers, servers, and routers, in a mixed Microsoft Windows and Unix environment, Mr. Smith said. As the workload reached 60,000 deployments a month, "our current infrastructure could not handle it," he said.
The acid test came when the company had to patch more than 20,000 desktops to account for a change in daylight-saving time, Mr. Smith said. Regulators warned banks in February that the change could affect computer systems. This year daylight-saving time began March 11, three weeks earlier than in years past, and will end Nov. 4, one week later than usual, due to the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Mellon had to use a two-step process, deploying a piece of software and installing a patch.
"We did 50,000 patches over a two-day period and were able to hit 99% of our PCs," Mr. Smith said. "That was one of the major proving grounds for the Altiris tool set."
Altiris said most companies hope to achieve 90% deployment in seven days.
"It was a pain" for the technical team, Mr. Smith said, but "it was something of a nonissue from a desktop standpoint."
Mellon plans to use the tool kit for "software virtualization" and "license reclamation" projects, comparing what the company has paid for to what its employees actually use for more efficient management of that intellectual property, Mr. Smith said. "That is another benefit that this product will eventually give us."
