Wilkie Sanderson Achieves Enterprise-Level Security with a One-Person IT Team

Our Customer

Wilkie Sanderson is a custom architectural millwork company headquartered in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. With a workforce operating across office and shop-floor environments, the company relies on a lean IT team, which is often a one-person operation, to support more than 80 endpoints. Maintaining security and compliance across these devices is critical for ensuring smooth production, minimizing downtime, and protecting the business from modern cyber threats.

Adaptiva’s Impact

• Compliance increased from an estimated ~50% to nearly 90%
• Fully autonomous patching eliminated manual endpoint updates
• Integrated seamlessly with SentinelOne for real-time threat intelligence and remediation
• Fast, intuitive deployment with strong customer success support

The Challenges

Before Adaptiva, patching was entirely manual and nearly impossible to keep up with. As a one-person IT shop, Kyle had to physically walk to every machine on the shop floor and click update on each device. With competing priorities and limited time, the company was rarely fully patched. Problems continued to stem from issues such as:

• Growing security risk exposure:
  With only ~50% of endpoints up to date, Wilkie Sanderson faced material vulnerability exposure. Despite using leading security tools, the lack of timely patching left significant gaps.
  
  
• Resource constraints in a small IT team:
  Like many manufacturing environments, the IT function is lean. Manual patching consumed time that could have been spent on higher-value work while still not achieving full compliance.

The Solution

Wilkie Sanderson turned to Adaptiva OneSite Patch to automate patching and improve compliance across its 80-endpoint environment. The decision was made even easier thanks to Adaptiva’s native integration with SentinelOne, which the company already used for vulnerability management.

“The decision to pair SentinelOne and Adaptiva came naturally,” said Nathe. “It was like a match made in heaven.” 

Adaptiva’s onboarding and customer success teams helped Wilkie Sanderson deploy the solution quickly, while the interface proved intuitive and easy to navigate. Features like automatic test groups and controlled production rollouts gave Nathe confidence that patches were being deployed properly.

Results: Wilke Sanderson Achieved Enterprise-Level Security with a Small IT Footprint

For lean IT teams, automation is more than a convenience; it’s a necessity. Without it, essential tasks like patching get deprioritized so teams can tackle other urgent day-to-day issues that keep the business running. 

The shift to autonomous patching allows small teams to stay ahead of threat actors, reduce exposure windows, and focus limited resources on strategic initiatives instead of repetitive maintenance. For Wilkie Sanderson, automation became a force multiplier, delivering the kind of ongoing protection that manual methods would never come close to achieving.

Specific results Wilkie Sanderson experienced included:

• Nearly doubling its patch compliance: Compliance jumped from an estimated 50% or lower to nearly 90% within months.
• Closing critical security gaps: By deploying patches consistently and as soon as they become available, Wilkie Sanderson is now more prepared and more resilient to emerging threats. 
• Freeing IT time for strategic work: Autonomous patching eliminated Wilkie Sanderson’s need for manual touch on each device, giving back time to focus on broader infrastructure improvements.

Conclusion

Simply put, with Adaptiva, Wilkie Sanderson ensured it had a stronger defense against modern cyber threats.

“Your XDR, your MDR, your EDR … they can find threats, but they cannot fix them,” said Nathe. “When you have an autonomous patching solution in place, you’re closing the door to 99% of the threats you’re facing.”

The combination of automated patching, intuitive controls, and its SentinelOne integration ensures that security updates are deployed quickly and reliably, without overwhelming the company’s small IT team.

“Adaptiva is easy to implement, intuitive to use, and incredibly robust,” said Nathe. “It’s made all the difference for us.”