Client management has always been a challenge, but these days it can often seem impossible, as IT environments become bigger and more complex than ever before. However, many companies are using yesterday's tools to keep modern networks ostensibly healthy and productive. The result is that CIOs are struggling to manage their environment and have no clear picture of the resources available and how to resolve any issues before end-user productivity suffers. Thankfully, it doesn't have to be like that. We show you how to make client management faster, easier and more efficient in three steps.
Many companies struggle to effectively mitigate cyber risks because they have no comprehensive overview of the endpoints in their environment. This makes implementing basic IT cyber hygiene practices such as regular patching difficult. This means that client management is more important than ever, because different, dynamic and distributed assets need to be managed and kept under control.
Why client management is so important
Unfortunately, many companies do not have the right tools to effectively manage clients in such complex environments. They use point tools that collect outdated, limited data sets from only small numbers of endpoints. As a result, they are forced to collect and analyse the data manually in a configuration management database (CMDB).
So it’s no wonder that client management is inefficient and therefore unsurprising that vulnerabilities can remain unprotected for days or weeks at a time. Conventional tools are unable to implement effective client management in modern IT infrastructures.
Our 3-point plan for efficient client management
In light of this, we are presenting a 3-point plan for improving client management and, in turn, your cyber security:
- Eliminate gaps in corporate visibility, insufficient central controls and inconsistent policy enforcement. The right tools for asset discovery and inventory, patch management and vulnerability and configuration management can all significantly help organisations.
- Eliminate the uncontrolled spread of IT tools that in the long run isolate IT security and operations, affect IT productivity and increase cyber-risk. Look for a single platform that can cover everything from asset discovery to patching.
- Focus on endpoint management to ensure that all staff members are always using properly configured and patched devices. The continuous monitoring of all endpoints, wherever they are, helps you to visualise, contextualise, prioritise and quickly resolve vulnerabilities and configuration issues.
Modern tools such as the ones from our partner, Tanium, make client management quick, easy and efficient, regardless of the size and complexity of your environment.
Transparency & efficiency – Why is this so important?
When you think that the time it takes to patch a vulnerability is on average around 205 days, it soon becomes clear how important the time factor in patch management is. However, time and transparency also play a crucial role in other areas.
When it comes to improving your IT hygiene, and with it your IT security, you need to be able to find all the assets across the network at any time and be aware of the current state of the endpoints. This is also essential for enforcing security policies and compliance.
But in threat detection too, it is important to be able to detect malicious activities and vulnerabilities within seconds – not once days or weeks have passed. The same applies to security incidents. Here, it is important to keep the reaction time and the effort required to investigate and eliminate the incident to a minimum. This is the only way to minimise the damage caused.
So you see, speed and transparency always play a decisive role in cyber security and client management.
“Single Source of Truth” – Client management with a single platform
With traditional tools, client management continues to be a sprawling, fragmented project involving multiple separate activities performed by many different isolated tools and teams. Tanium's platform approach, on the other hand, transforms your client management into a comprehensive approach, one that supports you across a wide range of use cases, all via a single agent and device.
- You have an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the state of your infrastructure at any given time.
- Your end-user computing teams can manage the entire fleet of workstations across all operating systems and device types.
- Your infrastructure teams can ensure that the server infrastructure is healthy, regardless of whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
- Your service desk teams are able to carry out root cause analysis across the entire infrastructure.
- Your security teams can control all endpoints and immediately react to security incidents.
- Applications such as Salesforce and ServiceNow can use the Tanium platform to drive automation and create a comprehensive self-service experience for end users.
Discover how Tanium can optimise your client management
Tanium's solution means that you improve the health and performance of all endpoints in real time. Tanium also provides you with a flexible suite of troubleshooting tools, all from a single zero-infrastructure platform.
In today's multi-location work environment, companies need a single platform for scalability, visibility and manageability. Integrated platforms that can leverage real-time endpoint telemetry and provide visibility, combined with better workflows that cover multiple domains, radically help businesses implement efficient IT cyber hygiene practices, reduce risk and ensure regulatory compliance.
