Company Profile

Product:      Certero for Enterprise SAM

Product:      Certero for Enterprise ITAM

Industry:      Government

Estate size:    2500+ 

Locations:     USA

The Challenge

The County had three main challenges:

• Lack of control over user admin rights
• Poor visibility in to their IT estate including hardware and software, critical for their windows 10 migration
• Unable to govern procurement leading to disparate purchasing

With very little governance over their desktop estate the County were struggling with their IT assets. With all end users having full local admin rights they could make a number of changes to their PC which included installing software, changing system settings, and overriding local folder permissions. This lack of control opened the County up to security and licensing risks. Aware of the risks they needed a solution that could give them control, and that could provide them with visibility of individuals access levels, asset inventory and give users a hassle-free way of access the software they needed.

The County struggled with their incumbent inventory tool SCCM, as the data it produced was incomplete, missed vital software usage information, was difficult consolidate and required manual processing to normalized the data. With an immediate need to move from Windows 7 to Windows 10, they needed a solution that could give them full visibility of their IT estate and track the process of the migration.

The County had fragmented software procurement and although there was an existing policy for IT to manage all software purchases, they had no way to enforce this due to limited visibility of their IT estate. This led to software applications being purchased by individual departments on P cards and then expensing it, giving IT no visibility. Leaving them unable to proactively manage contract renewals, as they would expire or renew without anyone realizing. Due to the lack of visibility they had no specific county wide purchasing agreements, missing out of substantial savings, and with this happening across 34 departments this quickly became a serious concern.

The Solution

Research

After substantial online research, the organization created a shortlist of vendors, including Certero due to their impressive reviews on Gartner Peer insights. Being the quickest to respond, Certero were the first vendor to provide a demonstration and left a high benchmark and for other vendors in terms of data quality, product functionality, dashboards and connectors. They found the flexibility and customization of Certero’s unified solution unparalleled to other vendors and could see how the solution could help them in their day to day roles. With all products sitting on the Certero unified platform, they worked seamlessly and holistically as a single solution with one UI, UX and data source making Certero a clear winner among the competition.

Clear Visibility

With Certero for Enterprise ITAM fully deployed the County now have a clear and accurate view of their IT estate. This gives them a full understanding of what was installed, what licenses they own, whether they have any security vulnerabilities and whether software is being used. Such detailed inventory allows them to proactively protect their IT estate from software vulnerabilities, something they previously could not achieve. Certero gives them visibility of computers that are not meeting security standards such as laptops that do not have bitlocker enabled, no anti-malware installed, old antivirus versions and computers that have end user admin access. This now gives them confidence that their IT estate is protected.

A key objective for the County was to be able to manage their Windows 10 migration, they needed visibility of their IT estate and centralized software distribution and packaging capabilities. Through Certero’s unified solution they were able to track Windows 10 deployment using software installation numbers to prioritize software packaging efforts and define standard application loads for deployment images.