Steel firm seals IT flaws from attack

Foseco guards its global intellectual property with automated patches

Steel giant Foseco is updating its IT security management systems to protect intellectual property and guard against viruses, spyware and hackers.

The FTSE-listed firm has installed BigFix patch configuration and IT security management systems at its offices in the UK, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and South Africa, and plans to extend it further over the next few months.

The BigFix technology automates the process of patching security vulnerabilities in Foseco’s Microsoft and Linux operating infrastructure, and updates its anti-virus, anti-spyware and Microsoft Office software.

Foseco will roll out the technology to South America in the next eight weeks, and then the rest of Europe and North America.

‘We are an expanding business with new offices being opened in Eastern Europe and the Far East,’ said Roger Chadderton, Foseco IT director.

‘One of our challenges is to ensure that we apply the same stringent network security standards across the world.

‘We rely on intellectual property to maintain our business as well as global communication and exchange of knowledge, so the network is absolutely mission-critical to us. We have to implement a level of hygiene that protects our network,’ he said.

By automating much of the security patching process, Foseco is also reducing IT administration costs, by removing the need for technical staff to manually fix individual computers.

‘The large sites are doing very well at keeping up with patching vulnerabilities and updating anti-virus and anti-spyware,’ said Craig Morris, information security manager at Foseco.

‘But we did not have a real view of what was going on at an enterprise level, so we needed something that we could distribute to keep control of the network.

‘Our industry is quite competitive and secretive, and a lot of research and development goes into our products, so we need to make sure that this information is secure to protect our position in the market place,’ he said.

IT consultancy Nebulas Security installed the central BigFix server at Foseco’s headquarters in Tamworth.