A Financial Services Company
We were able to get a lot of inventory on the machines without causing any issues or heavy load on the systems.
COMPANY BACKGROUND
A well-established US-based global investment and advisory firm that employs more than 2000 personnel.
CHALLENGE
The Company carried out a risk assessment and found a need to improve its IT asset management (ITAM) program to prevent a possible core vulnerability. The Company needed a SAM solution to inventory its IT estate and reached out to Gartner and Forrester to determine which vendor would best meet its needs. It looked at various tools but choose Snow for its strong customer support and out-of-the-box functionality.
The proof of concept and procurement were overseen by the Company’s Information Security Program Manager. She comments: “The process was simple and Snow was very flexible with our sourcing team’s requirements with the agreements.”
The company implemented Snow License Manager and Snow Inventory which the Program Manager describes as “straightforward”, involved the Company’s ITAM manager, its desktop engineering team and its server team for agent deployment
“We were able to get a lot of inventory on the machines without causing any issues or heavy load on the systems.”
-Information Security Program Manager
SNOW’S CONTRIBUTION
The Platform immediately impressed. “We were able to get a lot of inventory on the machines without causing any issues or heavy load on the systems,” says the Program Manager. Snow is giving the Company a better understanding of where its assets are. The roll-out of its ITAM program continues, but already Snow is helping identify needs in the management of the Company’s workstations.
Having implemented Snow, the Company can now access information quickly and efficiently when auditing its systems. However, Security was the main driver for bringing Snow on board. “The primary reason was to have an inventory of our installed software from a security risk standpoint,” the Program Manager explains, “The process was simple and Snow was very flexible with our sourcing team’s requirements with the agreements.”
THE FUTURE
The goals for the coming six months are to complete the Company’s hardware inventory, import all its software licensing information and implement processes for reconciliation and management. The Program Manager is also working towards an approved software list with a process to review new software requests.
Looking further ahead, there are ambitions to better manage versions from a patch and vulnerability perspective as well as improve management of software. “Snow will be used to manage a list of approved and unauthorized software.,” the Project Manager explains.
TO SUM UP
“The inventory agent and the information it can collect has, from a security perspective, been very useful, especially in situations where we are looking into a security incident or vulnerability related to an executable file. We are better able to run searches with Snow Inventory to see where that file is located on our workstations.”