In late 2003, Gap Inc. Direct needed to revamp its entire end-to-end business technology platform — from the customer-facing front-end system, to the back-end order management application, to the business tools that supported the company’s long-term growth strategy. Previously, Gap Direct’s e-commerce platform was largely built on Microsoft Windows. The need for new features — as well as concerns about the platform’s ability to scale given the retailer’s ambitious growth plans drove Gap Inc. Direct to evaluate alternative solutions to the Microsoft platform. Gap Inc. Direct uses Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) for administrative tools to grant and control end-user permission, but AD by itself doesn’t support Linux or Unix, this resulted in the need for several systems administrators and analysts to analyze all of the logs of hundreds of servers every time an audit needed to be performed — a task that took IT employees away from their day-to-day responsibilities.

The company was faced with upgrading its aging risk and compliance infrastructure, which previously relied on a disparate group of point products to scan for vulnerabilities and assess different operating systems for Sarbanes-Oxley and other types of compliance. Status data from the disparate solutions was imported into a SQL database onto which the IT department had built some limited dashboarding and reporting capabilities. However, IT personnel were still required to spend time writing custom code in order to extend the point solutions and enable them to interact with the database. In fact, the lack of integration among the various systems was creating inefficiencies that hampered the company’s ability to prepare for and pass compliance audits. The company sought a comprehensive and cost effective model for risk and compliance that would not only be easier to use and maintain, but provide a truly unified view into the status of all systems. As a UNIX shop, the company also needed a solution that could perform the deep, credentialed scans required for real protection from vulnerabilities, while also protecting the system’s root password.

The customer service division’s offshore call center had grown to over 5,000 Linux desktops that needed to be better managed and secured. Because authentication was being handled locally on the Linux machines, there was no easy way for the IT department to verify that any security policies were being followed. The company lacked the kind of central user account management for its Linux fleet that Active Directory typically provides for a Windows shop. In addition, the management of new hires, departures, and changing job roles had become a challenge. High turnover rates at the call center just made the problem worse.

The software development company was required by a large customer within the banking sector to control excessive administrative privileges across approximately 5,000 user endpoints. The bank's requirement came after an annual onsite audit identified a risk in relation to endpoint privileges. The software developer committed to a timeline of only three months to implement and deploy an effective and secure solution. The challenge was to find a solution that could control access privilege without disrupting the day-to-day work of its many users (endpoints).

Ramboll, a Danish engineering, architecture, design, and consultancy firm, faced challenges in standardizing IT policies and procedures across its global offices due to its growth through mergers and acquisitions. The company had a high number of applications in use, with each country handling access privileges and admin rights differently. This resulted in an overburdened local IT team and a lack of visibility and control at the global level. The company also faced cybersecurity threats and needed to manage software licenses effectively. The challenge was to find a solution that would not only bolster and standardize application control and privileged management across the organization but also ensure license compliance and software standardization.

Morris School District, located in Morristown, New Jersey, has 10 public school buildings serving 5,200 students in grades pre-K through 12. The school district employs more than 900 teachers and staff. The district is an active member of the League of Innovative Schools, a consortium of 114 independent school districts committed to helping K-12 schools rise up to address education challenges by fostering the innovative use of technology in learning. Like many school systems, Morris School District has diverse end users, which include teachers, students, and other staffers such as school psychologists, guidance counselors, aides, and school nurses. To help keep COVID-19 at bay, many of these users work remotely all or part of the week. However, what was not anticipated was the necessity of minimizing in-person interactions in response to COVID-19.

MANE, a leading flavor and fragrance group in France, was facing the challenge of preserving its business model and maintaining the secrecy of its formulas in a fast-evolving world where workplaces are experiencing accelerated digital transformation and relying more heavily on remote workers. The company needed to rethink its growth strategy and improve its IT infrastructure. They sought a secure solution to enable productivity for its modern work environment while ensuring its trade secrets stay secret. The company also needed to improve data and information system security by enhancing access controls, privilege management, and visibility over its numerous third-party suppliers and systems managers.

The City of Midlothian, Texas, was facing a challenge with its IT environment. The more secure it became, the less usable it was. Open access left sensitive networks vulnerable to attacks and increased the risk of a data breach. The city had to choose between more security or better availability, often sacrificing one for the other. Before 2018, granting access to third-party vendors and remote workers was a hands-on chore that required multiple touchpoints and tons of cleanup. The city used a VPN client from their firewall provider to set up accounts for vendors and third-party users. They would download and run the software client, input their credentials, and gain full access to the network. However, there were no actual security controls in that tunnel. The only way to keep people from logging in whenever they wanted was to disable the account, which also meant the IT team had to reactivate the account as needed.

XING, a social network for business professionals, was facing a challenge with its existing privilege elevation process. The process was too time-consuming and did not allow for a consistent set of access rights. The company was seeking to improve command elevation from an administrative point of view, as well as establish better auditing features. Furthermore, XING needed to keep in mind a number of regulatory and compliance requirements related to German privacy and related laws. This includes protection of private data, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), as well as other requirements for public companies.

Activant’s Eagle product includes a support option in the monthly service fee. Customers have immediate access to a Tier-1 phone support desk that operates in Manila, Philippines. These agents handle minor support issues and customer questions. If the call is not resolved in 10-20 minutes, the call is escalated to the Eagle group – a Tier-2 and up support center – based in Livermore, California. The Tier-2 group either receives phone transfers or calls customers back (depending on SLA). The Tier-2 group is divided into four specialty teams: credit cards, accounting, telecommunications and systems. Calls to this support group are usually complex, says Michelle Sanford, senior product support manager. The average call lasts 22 minutes with the average incident lasting around 57 minutes. Fifty-seven minutes away from a small retail business can be detrimental to customer service at the store level, so Activant knew they needed a way to connect to customers where they could view the screen and speed first call resolution. Activant previously used two remote meeting products, but needed a tool that would actually allow them to support customers.

In the fall of 2006, Los Alamos National Laboratory was tasked with performing an audit of their cyber security systems, including inspections of its safeguards and security functions. The audit aimed to ensure that the organization had a system in place that complied with federal regulations, including the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA). The lab was using sudo, an open source software program that only tracked activity on a machine-by-machine basis. However, the audit revealed inefficiencies associated with using sudo for these purposes. IT administrators were spending an excessive amount of time managing every machine individually to extract and consolidate relevant information from various logs to illustrate compliance and ability to monitor and control privileged users’ activity. Around the same time, the lab learned that it would be inheriting the responsibility of administering about 200 additional UNIX and Linux systems. The staff agreed that it would be impossible to manage this complex heterogeneous environment using the current monolithic architecture of open source sudo.

The University of Winchester, a 175-year-old institution, was facing a challenge in securing its vast IT infrastructure. The university had to protect and support around 1500 Windows desktops, used by approximately 8000 students and around 1000 staff members across 16 different departments. The network was set up so that both staff and students could not just connect their own devices to back-end systems, and access was limited to the Internet. The university had not experienced any security breaches, but there was no room for complacency. The challenge was to manage user privileges in a way that would not impact productivity or create additional administrative workload.

Care New England, a not-for-profit health care system, was facing challenges in managing its desktop infrastructure. The organization supports over 4,800 desktops and over 10,000 desktop end users, which includes over 250 applications such as Horizon. Many of the desktops include laptops used by nurses in the field. The end users are dispersed across New England in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The large coverage area needed for support, along with the challenges of managing Horizon and several other applications created many challenges for the IT team. A substantial amount of help desk calls were focused around the need to have administrative rights to install applications or run applications that required such rights. The only solutions available were to either send an IT tech to perform installations in person, provide admin rights to users who need the privileged access to run applications, or give a user full administrative rights to perform installs or run applications.

VistaPrint, an online supplier of high-quality graphic design services and customized print products, faced a significant challenge in its customer service center. The company uses Cisco Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Object Server and has also written applications of their own to optimize monitoring and logging of voice and onscreen activity of customer service representatives during calls. Many key applications that the customer service representatives use require elevated privileges, so each user at the call center is configured as a local administrator on their computer. This posed a security risk as viruses and malware could take advantage of these privileges to gain access through web browsers and email software, leading to downtime for the customer service representatives and therefore a slower response to customers. VistaPrint wanted to achieve a Least Privilege User environment and reduce virus and malware security issues at its call center without jeopardizing employee productivity.

Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, was in need of a robust IT solution to serve its campus communities. The University had entered a joint agreement with Cisco and HP for IT services and infrastructure, and as part of that agreement, the University outlined its remote support needs. The geographical distance between the two campuses and the need to support off-campus locations posed a significant challenge. The University was also in the process of migrating away from its legacy Windows domains, which brought additional challenges. The University needed a solution that could provide support to users on virtually any platform, no matter where they were located.

Gonzaga University, a private institution of higher education, was facing a challenge of managing its vast and diverse infrastructure with limited control over resources. The university has more than 2,000 computers, over 200 servers and more than 20,000 network switch ports on campus. Unlike a corporation, higher education institutions face the challenge of having limited control over resources that absolutely have to be a part of the network. Gonzaga must also protect its key information assets from those same devices for which they do not have the kind of control that a typical corporate entity would. With a comprehensive wireless network and shared bandwidth, the potential to propagate malware and malicious software is much higher on a college campus than within a corporation.

Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina, has been experiencing substantial growth over the past four years, with the construction of several new buildings. The college's IT technicians were facing challenges in providing efficient tech support to the growing campus community. They were either traveling in person to user locations on campus or using UltraVNC to provide remote support. However, the remote support team experienced repeated problems with latency when using the UltraVNC tool. This led to inefficiencies and time-consuming processes, as technicians had to physically travel to different parts of the campus to provide support.

DTI, a leading provider of in-house and outsourced legal services and technology solutions, was facing a significant challenge in terms of data security and vulnerability management. The company had no visibility into its vulnerabilities, which was a major concern given the sensitivity of the data they handle. They had initially tried to resolve the issue using a combination of services and tactical products, but soon realized that they needed a more structured approach. The pressure from external auditors and compliance mandates also necessitated the need for continuous refinement of their internal processes to improve their overall risk profile. DTI needed a mature vulnerability management solution that provided a significant level of flexibility and scalability, delegation, automation and comprehensive reporting features for compliance purposes.

SM Energy Company, an independent energy company engaged in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids in onshore North America, was facing challenges in vulnerability assessment and patch management. With a team of only two individuals devoted to patching and scans, the organization was unable to put a formal remediation strategy in place due to lack of useful information. With over 700 users on the network located all over the United States, SM Energy was in need of a solution that would ease the burden of patching and increase the overall security program effectiveness without the high cost of redesigning critical infrastructure. They were using SCCM, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, as a standalone product, which required a lot of time to deploy patches and then validate that they were deployed correctly. However, there was no visible or measurable outcome from this patching effort that showcased if they were providing a better security stance.

Cargotec, a leading provider of cargo handling integrated solutions and services, had a scattered approach to remote support and realized the need to standardize on a single solution. The company had approximately 30 IT support desk representatives and 90 local IT personnel located around the globe to serve more than 7,500 users in its many local branches. Prior to obtaining Bomgar, the organisation used a number of different remote support solutions. The type of issues fielded by Cargotec’s IT support team include helping users who have trouble connecting to the corporate network or are experiencing problems using its Citrix applications.

Locknet, a company providing IT security and compliance services, was facing a challenge with their vulnerability assessment process. The process was time-consuming and required technicians to travel to each customer site, which was not cost-effective. The company intended to use vulnerability assessments as a foundation for offering other security services, but the assessments themselves were taking up too much time. Technicians were spending six hours per day in their cars, resulting in lost hours for both the company and its clients. As a result, Locknet was losing money on each vulnerability assessment and was unable to scale its security service offerings.

Micro Plastics, a major plastic fastener manufacturer, was facing the challenge of maintaining the security of its computer network. With over 300 users and 10 servers, the company found it increasingly difficult to monitor potential vulnerabilities and address issues arising from hacker or virus attacks. The company needed a tool that could proactively identify vulnerabilities before they became problems. The company's IT Manager, Reed Kimble, was confident about the security of the network but wanted to verify his instincts. The company was looking for a solution that could identify any potential threats in their operating environment that could be exploited by hackers or viruses, potentially hindering business operations.

Cheshire and Merseyside Commissioning Support Unit (CMCSU) was formed through the merger of several previous organisations. It provides support for over 20,000 NHS staff across the region, including clinical staff at 12 CCG organisations, two area teams for the National Commissioning Board and a range of social care, public health and community care professionals. Overall, it is responsible for supporting 11,000 devices in 218 different locations. These mergers provided a great opportunity to re-evaluate approaches and strategies for support and service delivery. The CMCSU team decided to move over to a hybrid model for support where calls could be handled in volume while the amount of time spent on resolution could also be improved. This meant a change in approach, and a more strategic role for remote support. This involved commissioning a new remote support product as part of the change.

SICREDI, a credit union in Brazil, was facing a challenge in maintaining its network security. Despite having robust perimeter security, the credit union lacked advanced security tools. They needed to gain insight into specific security incidents, assess network and endpoint vulnerabilities, and determine which incidents and vulnerabilities were the most risky. They also needed to develop a deeper understanding of their changing network and the security needed to protect it. The credit union's internal network had grown from a few servers and workstations to a sprawling environment that IT had lost control over. They needed a solution that could help them regain control and automate some of the cumbersome IT tasks contributing to network sprawl, increasing vulnerabilities, and security blind spots.

When Gene Glekel joined Cresa as National Director of Infrastructure, he wanted to improve security and the user experience throughout the company when it came to remote support. At that time, the company’s support representatives were using a cloud-based remote support tool. Glekel saw a number of disadvantages with this tool for both the support reps and the end users. The existing tool required installing a resident agent on the user’s machine before providing remote support. The support reps experienced difficulty managing the computer’s administrative rights to enable remote support. Establishing the remote support session required end users to perform a sequence of time-consuming tasks on their machine. Latency and instability in the connection were also frequent problems. Additionally, if a machine needed rebooting, the cumbersome process of working with the end user to establish a connection had to be performed all over again. Security was another concern. The resident agent used by the SaaS solution lacked adequate security because it was constantly in ‘listening mode’ and therefore vulnerable to brute force and social engineering attacks.

Eat’n Park Hospitality Group, a franchise with 75 locations and operating in 150 locations with approximately 10,000 employees, was seeking a solution to improve IT support for users and address growing concerns about data security in the payment card industry (PCI). The company wanted to centralize support for the company’s users, provide high level security with multiple authentication mechanisms and enable the IT support team to establish connections with and monitor devices 24 hours a day. The company also wanted a solution that would integrate within the company’s data center and network infrastructure.

Mobile Knowledge was in search of a new security solution that could provide comprehensive protection without breaking the bank. They were dissatisfied with large security suites, such as those from McAfee and Symantec, as they found them to be more focused on profit than privacy. These suites often segmented different types of protection and sold them separately, forcing users to purchase multiple products to ensure complete protection. This was not only costly but also forced companies to prioritize their risks and protect against only the most immediate threats. The company was also looking for a solution that offered superior protection against zero-day attacks.

Emporos Systems’ support team faced a dual challenge. Firstly, they required a remote support system that could provide the highest level of security. As a technology vendor to pharmacies and other healthcare sites, Emporos’ support infrastructure had to be fully compliant with patient privacy regulations like HIPAA and credit card data regulations (e.g. PCI DSS). Their previous remote support solution and many of the solutions they evaluated only offered static password capabilities. This wasn’t acceptable as a majority of Emporos’ support is delivered while client business transactions are happening. To meet security standards, Emporos needed a solution that could support its RSA security technology, which updated passwords every minute. Secondly, the Emporos Systems support team required a solution that would provide access to support systems from home or work, as well as the ability to manage multiple support sessions. With a team supporting multiple time zones and receiving dozens of support calls a day, this level of flexibility was required to keep support costs low and service levels high.

The Sallie B. Howard School for the Arts and Education (SBH) was struggling to keep up with the integration of technology in education. As students relied more heavily on computers and the Internet, teachers and administrators noticed much of the activity wasn’t school-related. The existing security was not keeping in lock step with the way students were using the Internet. Viruses had slipped through, and non-education related sites were seeing heavy traffic. Even with URL blocking in place, a supposedly trusted site could be compromised and contain malicious code. A new and inappropriate site could fall through the cracks, not yet blacklisted. Technically-savvy students had already found ways to bypass the school’s defenses.

Fiserv, a Fortune 500 company providing technology solutions for the banking industry, had a team of 50-100 employees dedicated to providing remote support. However, staff often spent up to two weeks a month traveling to client sites for training and software installation. The company started offering 'vTrips' (virtual trips) to clients for software upgrades, which were well-received and identified as a potential new service channel. However, for this service to be effective, Fiserv needed a solution that could 'virtualize' its staff and ensure greater productivity. The solution also needed to meet the stringent security and audit needs of both Fiserv and its clients. The company's previous solution had a 'pay by the drink' licensing structure, which became costly as the use of clientless remote support expanded.