Streamline Help desk Management
Alloy Software's Alloy Navigator 5
I work at a small company, and nearly a third of the workforce works remotely.
Our rapid growth drove the need for a better, more organized approach to IT
governance. After researching the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and tools
that would let us implement some of ITIL's best practices, we tested four service
management products and found that Alloy Software's Alloy Navigator was
the best platform for the money. One feature I like is that we can purchase
only the asset modules we need and grow into the product's full capabilities
over time.
Navigator was simple to install and went from development to production without major reconfiguration. One of our favorite features is that we can create business
rules and customize them to match our business processes; another is the product's
customizable data lists, which can be easily shared with IT staff. Whenever we had
difficulty, Alloy's technical support team was responsive and thorough.
The software has a nice admin guide, but the documentation doesn't do a good
job of explaining how powerful the product is. I made numerous support requests
for new features to be added to future versions, only to find out that most
of them already existed. On the negative side, the software recognition manager
isn't the easiest to navigate and figure out, and the self-service Web site
that's packaged with Navigator is a bit limited in its functionality.
Despite these shortcomings, I find Navigator to be a great product. We've increased our customer satisfaction by
almost 30 percent while realizing an 85 percent reduction in monthly support calls. When we began using Navigator, we
were averaging nearly 2,000 logged support incidents each month; now we log fewer than 300 and our freed-up Help
desk staff has been able to take on more responsibilities. And Navigator still isn't fully implemented—our next step is to
implement its change management capabilities.
Alloy Navigator is powerful and easy to use, and that's a combination that I don't often find in software products.
Automate security Monitoring
Security Laboratories' Security Recon
Our IT environment has a large number of Windows servers, Active Directory domains,
and Microsoft SQL Server database servers. As the security director for our
organization, I'm charged with monitoring security processes and activities
across the whole IT infrastructure. Historically, it's been difficult to ascertain
what was going on on our network from a security perspective, then distill that
information and analyze it from a central location. I'd been using a series
of scripts and manual processes to format security data into something that
could be reported and acted on. But over time, this approach to security monitoring
and compliance proved to be unmanageable.
While I was trying to find a better solution, I came across Security Recon
from Security Laboratories, and it seemed to be the right product to
solve our monitoring, reporting, and compliance needs. After reviewing and testing
the product I found it quite capable of solving our problems and providing us
with a central Web-based console for analysis. The initial installation of Recon
went smoothly, although some integration activities needed to be coordinated
with our database group.
Recon's automated reporting function is one of the product's most
appealing features. It lets us design reports that provide information
on general or specific security violations, schedule the reports to run
automatically, then provide that information to our IT staff via email.
Another welcome feature, Access Profiling, lets us find out what system
and network resources a given user or group has access to.
Recon's Help system was beneficial when we were trying to get the product installed
and running, but it could be improved to provide additional operations guidance.
Overall, Security Recon has become a key player in our arsenal of security and
auditing tools.
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