Bob Evans Strengthens Security and Accelerates Patch Compliance Across 400+ Restaurants
How the restaurant chain improved visibility and reduced patch timelines without disrupting business-critical operations using Adaptiva OneSite Patch
Our Customer
Bob Evans Restaurants is a full-service chain stretching from Michigan to Florida. The restaurant chain relies on a lean team to manage over 7,000 endpoints supporting point-of-sale systems, digital ordering, curbside pickup, and delivery platforms across 417 locations. Ensuring the availability, security, and compliance of these systems is vital to delivering a seamless customer experience and keeping restaurant operations running without disruption.
Adaptiva’s Impact
- Reduced critical patch time from over a month to approximately two weeks
- Fully autonomous patching eliminated manual deployment across 7,000+ endpoints
- Integrated with third-party tools for real-time visibility and vulnerability remediation
- Distributed patches over limited-bandwidth connections via peer-to-peer delivery
“If I can keep the registers and point-of-sale machines up in the restaurants, and the devices doing take-out ordering, online ordering and curbside delivery efficiently, then we’re doing our job.”
— Christopher Powell, Senior Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure, Bob Evans
The Challenges
Prior to Adaptiva, Bob Evans faced the difficult realities of securing and maintaining thousands of endpoints across hundreds of restaurants operating in areas with limited bandwidth.
The team struggled to update systems without interrupting daily operations. As a result, patch cycles lagged, visibility into compliance was limited, and updates frequently took a back seat to keeping restaurants running smoothly. The team faced these persistent challenges:
- Slow time to compliance: It often took over a month to reach compliance after each patch cycle, leaving critical vulnerabilities exposed for extended periods.
- Broad bandwidth limitations: Many restaurant locations run on limited network connections, making traditional centralized patch distribution inefficient and risky.
- Reducing operational disruptions: Registers, kitchen systems, and digital ordering platforms needed to remain fully operational during the patching process.
- Limited scalability of manual processes: With a small team, Bob Evans needed automation and visibility to improve its security posture without increasing headcount.
“With the evolution of restaurants, especially with online ordering through services like Uber Eats and DoorDash, and the increasing digitalization of the kitchen, it’s critical everything runs smoothly so we can serve customers, retain customers, and gain new ones,” Powell said.
The Solution
Bob Evans chose Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch to automate patching, optimize bandwidth usage, and gain full visibility into compliance across its 400+ restaurant locations.
Adaptiva’s peer-to-peer technology enabled updates to be efficiently delivered to restaurants with limited network connectivity, while traffic prioritization ensured critical security patches could be deployed without disrupting day-to-day operations in the front of house, kitchen, and online.
“Having a product actually deliver across smaller pipes made a big difference,” Powell said.
Adaptiva also provided the transparency and reporting the Bob Evans team needed to track compliance and react quickly to emerging risks.
“Knowing where our challenges are enables us to make changes and react faster,” he added.
Results: Bob Evans Strengthened Security Without Adding Headcount
For companies with distributed locations and small teams, automation provides more than a productivity boost; it’s essential to their function. Without it, critical work is easily pushed aside in favor of day-to-day operational support that keeps locations serving guests without disruption.
By shifting to an automated patching model, Bob Evans is now able to stay ahead of evolving threats, shrink exposure windows, and keep its lean IT team focused on higher-value initiatives instead of repetitive maintenance. Automation effectively acts as a force multiplier, delivering consistent protection at a scale that manual processes could never match.
With Adaptiva, Bob Evans achieved:
- Faster time to compliance: Patch cycles that once took more than a month now bring critical and high-severity vulnerabilities into compliance in roughly two weeks.
- Stronger security posture: Consistent, automated patching helps reduce the window of opportunity for attackers and improves resilience across 7,000+ endpoints.
- Preserved restaurant uptime: Registers, kitchen systems, and digital ordering platforms stay online during patching, protecting both revenue and the guest experience.
- Greater impact from a lean team: Automation and better visibility allow the small team to support a large, cloud-based environment without expanding staff.
Conclusion:
For Bob Evans, maintaining secure, compliant, and highly available systems was essential to delivering consistent customer experiences across hundreds of restaurant locations.
With Adaptiva OneSite Patch, the restaurant chain strengthened its ability to protect critical systems while maintaining the stability required to run its business.
The combination of automated patching, peer-to-peer delivery, and real-time compliance visibility now ensures security updates are deployed quickly and reliably across all restaurant locations, without disrupting the customer experience in person or online.
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