Expand Visibility,See Clearly, Act Decisively
Better IT Insights for Better
Business OutcomesTable of Contents
Introduction

3

Lack of Visibility: 6 Use Cases

4

1: Laptops in Slow-Mo

4

2: Routers on the Receiving Dock

5

3: Pinching Pennies

7

4: Snail Email8

5: Laptop Lockout

9

6: Into the IT Unknown

9

Ivanti: The Eyes in the Back of Your Head

11

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2Introduction
If you take away nothing else from this white paper,
consider this:Gaining a full view of your IT assets, services,
security posture, processes, and outcomes lays thefoundation to properly manage, secure, and optimize
your IT estate. You’ll see more clearly, be able toact more decisively, and become more effective.
This, in turn, will help you optimize costs and futurebudgets, improve the experience of your customers
and employees, and position your team to be moreproductive and efficient.
And who wouldn’t want that in today’s world of highly
regulated industries and compliance mandates; theneed to provide clear direction for patching, cost
optimization, application control, and asset location;and IT’s “seat-at-the-table” objective of becoming acenter of innovation, not just a cost center.
The truth is, full visibility is attained by degrees—withfirst steps, then more steps. For example:■ Without establishing a baseline of where you’restarting from, how can you know what you havefrom an asset, security, process, and maturity
perspective, or the amount and type of workcoming into IT?
■ How can you manage what you don’t know

About this White Paper
This white paper provides six brief, illustrative use
cases and research data points to help you assess
where your IT organization could gain greater clarityand visibility, and it invites you to evaluate Ivantisolutions that are proven to help organizations do so.

about in your IT environment?
■ How can you deliver greater value to the businesswith the same budget and IT resources?
■ How can you provide wider support for abroadening array of endpoint-device types withimmature and/or manual practices that limit
visibility across the board?

Ivanti Illuminates Every Corner ofYour Enterprise IT Estate
Gaining visibility must become a foundational practice,and proven solutions from Ivanti direct a spotlight on
every aspect of your enterprise IT estate. A unified
IT approach brings together the IT teams from IT
Service Management, IT Asset Management, Endpoint
Security Management, and User and Workspace
Management—organized under the pillars ofEnterprise Service Management and Unified Endpoint
Management. Supplied with greater clarity andvisibility, you’re more in sync with your users, services,and assets across the enterprise—and with yourIT landscape, security posture, and processes anddata. You have the wherewithal to attain more of yourstrategic objectives.

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3

Lack of Visibility: 6 Use Cases
Consider the six use-case scenarios that follow, and pain points typically associated with a lack of visibility.

1The scenario above touches on several unknowns:

Laptops in Slow-Mo■ The risk of non-compliance due to unlicensed

software used.
■ Shadow IT—employees circumventing IT andA help desk agent notices an uptick in
calls concerning issues around slow laptopperformance. After many time-consuming
follow-up calls, the agent learns anexecutive returned from a conference aweek earlier with what the exec deemed
was a “killer app” and encouraged
downloading from his USB drive, resulting
in reuse of the same license. Further
investigation also reveals the app is a
resource hog, but it’s unclear how many
laptops now have the app installed.

installing unauthorized software.
■ The number of laptops potentially affected.
■ The total number of incoming related incidents.
■ Security risks created by the unauthorizedsoftware installation and usage.
■ Unknown license true-up risks.

Reinforcing the message that you can’t manage,
protect, and optimize what you don’t know you havenor can easily see, an Ernst & Young (EY) white paper
titled “Data Validation the Best Practice for Data
Quality in Fixed Asset Management” states that 56%of enterprises verify the location of their fixed assets
once a year, while 10% to 15% have not verified theirMany IT organizations today have immature and/or
manual practices in place that limit visibility across theboard. Without visibility, it’s very difficult to detect,manage, and secure hardware and software, as wellassets in more than five years.
With no formal IT Asset Management (ITAM) program,teams often rely solely on Active Directory or basic
inventory information from endpoint management

as manage software usage effectively.

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4

43%

Survey research study commissioned by Ivanti inDecember 2019 found the following. Please note that2Routers on theReceiving Dockorganizations may be using more than one of theseof organizations surveyed arestill using spreadsheets.

50solutions. On the topic of tracking assets, the ITXM%

are using an endpoint
management solution.

options:
Multiple sources of data that must be married

The Network Ops team gets a call fromtogether—such as ITSM, ITAM, and SAM data—restrict

the receiving dock. A pallet of new routers

the speed to gain needed insight and overall visibility.

has just arrived. The Ops team starts

According to research by Enterprise Management

configuring the new routers to replace someAssociates (EMA), 50% of organizations have 12 orolder ones before they realize no one had

more discovery and/or inventory tools, and 11% haveordered the new routers in the first place.

more than 30 tools. On average, organizations spend
10 hours a week resolving data accuracy issues, while
32% spend more than 25 hours per week.
In short, lack of visibility means you can’t manage,protect, and optimize what you don’t know you have45%

use inventory tools as oneof their resources.

nor can easily see. Ivanti solutions use powerful
data-importing capabilities that help you combine
data from several sources—spreadsheets, inventory
tools, barcode scans, discovery services, etc.—tocompare actual data against discovered data andreport on discrepancies. With these insights, decision
makers can validate assumptions and make sure asset
information is always up to date and accurate.

A lack of visibility leads to plenty of unknowns. What’s
the procurement history? Who are the preferredvendors and fulfillment paths? What are some of thepotential security risks from unauthorized hardware
connecting to the network?
The Ivanti-commissioned ITXM Survey (December2019) mentioned earlier asked about howorganizations track and monitor purchase data,contracts, and warranty data for their IT assets. The
survey found the following. Again, please note thatorganizations may be using more than one of these
options:

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539%

38%

37%

22%

of respondents use multiple
systems and repositories.

annually track this as part oftheir inventory spreadsheets.

track it as part of their asset
management repository/
database.

use a separate contract
management system.

Visibility into data and data sources—knowing what

■ You can use asset-discovery insights to makedata there is and having it all in one place—will do

predictions and take prescriptive action onmuch to ease the pains listed above. That should leadproblem asset types, models, and vendor

to data that’s consistent, accurate, and trustworthy.

information.

As mentioned in the introduction, when Enterprise
Service Management and Unified Endpoint
Management are closely aligned, integrated, andautomated:■ You’ll benefit from deeper insight to help improvevendor management, compliance, and warranty
optimization.
■ IT staff are freed from reactive or unnecessary

activities to focus on more strategic projects■ Security risks are reduced by knowing what

hardware is authorized for use.
■ You can accomplish more while

minimizing costs and administrative
efforts, providing more value directly
to the business.

3

What’s more, the ITXM Survey research study in

Pinching Pennies

December 2019 found that:
Understanding asset lifecycles, performance,compliance, and cost implications is particularly

The CIO directs staff to seek budget

important for business enterprises operating in highly

savings for the current year. The VP ofregulated industries. The medical device industry andOperations wants to see if they can defer

the governmental Mobile Device Regulation (MDR) andthe laptop refresh cycle, but it’s uncertain

associated European Database on Medical Devices

how many laptops would be involved, which(EUDAMED) regulations in the European Union areemployees may be impacted, what potentialexamples.

issues would be created, and how muchbudget it would actually save.

The visibility pain points that surface in this use caseinclude an unknown laptop-type incident and vendor
history, no consistent tracking of the entire asset
lifecycle to determine health and performance of
laptop types, and an unknown patching history. It’s
also unknown which employees could be impacted.
With proper insights, an Ivanti customer was able toextend the hardware refresh cycles by six to twelve
months, saving the IT organization an initial $1.5
million without increasing incident rates or impacting
service quality to end users.

Survey:The Impact of Aligning IT Service& Asset Management Processes
Do your service management processes andrequest workflows automatically have visibility
into asset information and relationships?

50%

28%

of IT professionals surveyed
devote hours each week
supporting out-of-warranty/
out-of-support policy assets.

20%of them indicate they don’t
have insights into which assets
are out of date.

43%

40%

30%

31%
26%

20%

10%

Yes

SometimesNo4

Snail EmailThe lack-of-visibility pains here include an unclear

It’s also worth displaying the finding below, taken fromchange-and-configuration history, no view of future

the December 2019 ITXM Survey, revealing whether

changes, no analysis of change impact and risks, andorganizations’ service management processes andan unknown hardware inventory.

request workflows have visibility automatically into

Organizations develop IT goals to heighten theirasset information and relationships:

A flood of employee calls greets the help

maturity level and employ automation to realize

As you can see, fewer than one third of respondents

desk staff first thing in the morning. Emailefficiency gains. Yet many forget the critical firstindicated they had visibility into asset information,“isn’t working” or is “extremely slow.” After

step—establishing a baseline to start from. This

while the remaining two thirds did sometimes or not atseveral calls to other IT teams, the ITmeans: 1) gaining full visibility into processes andall.

Operations team concludes someone had

actions that affect key services and underlying assets

updated the email application overnightsuch as change management; and 2) obtaining a fulland the current server couldn’t handle theunderstanding of patterns in incidents, what’s causing

resulting configuration changes, leading tooutages, and more in order to provide that baseline

performance issues. It’s not immediatelyfrom which to improve.

clear if they have the needed hardware toalleviate the issues.

According to the same survey, IT professionals
expect to see the following improvements with help
from integrated IT service management and IT asset
management processes and data:

The fact is, despite the best efforts of IT teams,■ 63% Better visibility of the IT estatepoor systems and a lack of resources can make for■ 59% Increased IT staff productivity

tactical and reactive service and support activities.

■ 54% Optimized costs

A systematic approach to move beyond short-term■ 53% Improved service delivery

outcomes is constrained, and issues are resolved adhoc. What’s more:■ Many processes are manual, lacking consistent IT

workflows or standards.
■ Visibility of status or impact is less than desired,with minimal to no reporting capabilities.
■ Ongoing costs and risks are high, resolution

timelines often lengthen, and service quality
is low.

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85

Laptop Lockout

70% of organizations would most want to know about

resolution times on incidents and problems. In this use

security status if they could obtain real-time insights,

case, increasing the scope of visibility of the potential

and nearly 60% would want visibility into application

threat resulting from the suspect email fosters fasterdata.

remediation.

From a Unified Endpoint Management perspective,
Calling the help desk, a sales rep reports

lack of visibility increases the time involved in tacklinghe’s locked out of his laptop and says

security incidents. It also increases the risk of an

there’s a screen message to call anotherincident turning into a breach that compromises annumber to unlock. He also mentions he hadorganization’s data, adds pressure to overworked

clicked on a link from an email he thoughtteams, and reduces the trust in the organization.

was from a partner he’s worked with before,

This can be the result of limited visibility or a lack ofand that’s when the laptop locked. It’s

integrated data, leading to conflicting asset data andnot clear, but other employees possibly

security information that create visibility gaps andreceived the same email.

make quick action difficult.
In contrast, with visibility into accurate patch data

In this use case, the potential pains that arise froma lack of visibility include no insight into otheremployees who received the same email, no updated
view of current patch coverage, no knowledge of who

and user access information, it’s possible to respondto attacks faster, protecting the network; kill threats
like ransomware and stop them from spreading; andprepare for future attacks.

has administration privileges for machines, and noAlso, a lack of visibility makes it difficult to manage

insight into the number of infected devices andre-imaging needs efficiently to support remediation in

their status.

situations described above.

An Ivanti-sponsored Windows 10 survey in 2019

From the perspective of a service desk analyst, full

found that one top security concern of respondents

visibility into what assets are in the environment,is the risk of data breaches (41%), followed by fear

where they are, who is using them, and how theyof ransomware / malware (20%). In addition, anotherare used—all without cumbersome spreadsheets—isIvanti-sponsored survey from April 2019 found thatessential for efficient job performance, including faster

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96Into the Unknown

become a risk to data integrity and compliance. And

first start out with IT Asset Management, it’s notwith IT vulnerabilities on the rise, keeping track of

uncommon to find 20% to 30% more devices than they

every device becomes critical.

thought they had. You can’t manage what you don’t

The EY white paper mentioned earlier titled “DataValidation the Best Practice for Data Quality in Fixedknow you have, and this poses a significant
security risk.

An IT analyst is evaluating the environment’s

Asset Management,” states that 30% of IT fixedWith Unified Endpoint Management solutions, you gain

security, and she realizes it is unknown

assets are “ghost” assets and can’t be found. Assetcomplete visibility and control over your endpoints,

what machines are in the environment orvisibility is a critical first step as many organizations

helping you secure everything and avoid threats

whether they’re managed properly. Only

underestimate what they have. When organizations

resulting from unprotected and unmanaged devices.

75% of the environment is known. ThroughIT teams benefit from an automated provisioning

refreshes, etc., machines are becoming

strategy that performs real-time scans and reconciles

unmanaged. On the server-side, virtualuser and location information. To avoid virtual servermachines have been created without thesprawl, it’s critical to see who has administrative

proper configuration information, nor kept

privileges so that other IT groups can only spin up

up to date with the latest patches.

virtual machines with security that’s at productionlevel. Even then, the ability to find these new servers
and add them to groups will avoid missing the next

In this use case instance, there’s no view of endpoints
and servers in the environment and therefore no
insight into what’s patched to production level.
Knowing where all organizational assets are at all
times—physical or virtual—is not only vital from aservice and support perspective, but from a security
standpoint. Unmanaged and unpatched assets

maintenance window.
What’s more, it’s critical to manage assets throughout
their entire lifecycle. By tracking performance asset
data, issues, fixes, patch information, contracts, andlicensing, you can ensure software and hardware
investments are running at optimal performance andnot impacting employee productivity.

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10

Ivanti: The Eyes in the Backof Your HeadCIOs, CISOs, and VPs of IT don’t attain suchlevels of leadership and responsibility bybeing Cycloptic, myopic, or shortsighted.
To that end, the expanded visibility you
can experience with our Unified Endpoint
Management and Enterprise Service
Management solutions can complement
and support your team objectives, industry
insight, and business mission and vision.
See for yourself how Ivanti improves your IT
visibility—empowering you to act decisively
toward an improved IT experience for users
and realize gains in organizational efficiency
and productivity. Please contact us to learn
more.

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