Imagine what you can do with millions of dollars in savings.
As the need for increased and intelligent security solutions becomes apparent across the board for any business, organizations are investing thousands, even millions of dollars in an attempt to keep their business safe.
Unfortunately, most of the tools available cannot actually perform the way they claim to. That’s why we, at 1E are on a mission to educate the community with stories like this one – on how a US federal agency was able to quickly realize significant savings by identifying and removing unapproved software not even meant to be on the network – importantly reducing their security risk exposure.
Read the case study to learn the journey they took with 1E solutions.
When the US President gave all of its agencies the power to be in control of their own IT investments through the FITARA Act (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act), better software asset management practices became a necessity.
The US Federal Government spends over $80 billion a year on IT products and services. Almost half of this goes to maintaining old and out-of-date systems.
Working closely with an implementation partner who reaches out to clients to work with them using 1E solutions, allows us to help a wider group of businesses in need. BOC is one of those partners, specializing in supporting US Civilian Federal Government Agencies, who faced a very daunting challenge – cleaning up a federal agency’s IT estate. Their challenge, to provide new and clear standards for software procurement, gain insight into best practices, and tackle an out-of-control, de-centralized software environment.
Luckily, the agency understood the issues at hand. They were more than willing to do whatever it took to get their organization back on track.
After extensive analysis of tools available on the market, our partner got to work using AppClarity.
Very soon after the overhaul took place, our client had an almost immediate and dramatic impact on their environment. Similarly, with our work with the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), this organization also saw significant savings. Our partner from BOC Nick Coons was confident about the savings. He said, “Right off the bat, within the first 6 months, there were a $1.7 million dollar savings. This was through the Microsoft agreement and another $163,000 in the Adobe agreement they had.”
Savings were found quite quickly and were a positive step in the right direction. Most importantly, the important success takeaway is the awareness gained by the agency surrounding their security strategy.
The Agency had no idea what was out there – sprawl of unapproved, unused software and inaccurate reporting was a huge concern. Because of the thousands of rogue pieces of software across the agency’s IT estate that weren’t supposed to be on the network, the door to potential vulnerabilities was wide open. Using AppClarity to eliminate that key concern was the biggest success of the project.
BOC cites AppClarity’s software reclaim policies as an especially beneficial aspect of the solution. Our partner said, “The main reasons I’d recommend AppClarity is that the toolset gives you the ability to actually build a SAM practice to service your organization."
Now, following a large decrease in the amount of software installs over the last year, this Federal Government Agency can be confident in its compliance strategy with FITARA standards and is well prepared, with an automatic reclaim process now in place, for maintaining cost savings, minimizing the impact of software vendor audits and importantly reducing their security attack surface through knowing what software they have and who’s using it – no more sprawl.
