Clackamas River Water solidifies assets tracking with SAManage
“SAManage gives us the visibility to see if any computers are running applications they are not supposed to, so we can work with the users to remove these risks“.
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Background
Clackamas River Water (CRW) is a domestic water supply district that serves Oregon’s Clackamas County, located in the southeastern part of the Portland metropolitan area. The CRW organization views excellent service as the core of its business. Its mission statement is to provide the highest quality water and services at the right time, the right place, and the right price.
Needless to say, a functional and smoothly operating information technology is one of the keys to the success of the organization in attainting its service excellence mission. Overseeing the IT department at Clackamas River Water is Quincy Whitfield, its Information Technology & Security Manager.
Challenges
With desktops, laptops, and server machines installed at the organization’s two office locations, real-time tracking of all hardware and software is imperative for ensuring effective management of these assets.
Over the years, CRW has put in place a number of IT Asset Management solutions, ranging from Excel spreadsheet to a custom Microsoft Access application. “Excel was too rudimentary, and the Access application was too much work to maintain,” says Whitfield.
Following that experience, CRW decided to deploy a commercial IT Asset Management application, and implemented the Dell eSMART Software-as-a-Service solution. Unfortunately, it did not provide the relief Whitfield was expecting. “Generating reports with eSMART was too complicated,” says Whitfield.
These difficulties became an issue when preparing a budget for equipment upgrade. Whitfield was attempting to generate a report of the oldest desktops in the organizations, including their locations and specifications. “It wasn’t user friendly-enough for me to just go into the application and figure out how to generate these reports,” he adds.
Solution
After an introduction to the SAManage on-demand IT Asset Management solution, Whitefield was able to quickly deploy the application and get the agents up and running on all machines. “With eSMART we had some issues with the agents running on different versions of Windows; we did not come across such issues with SAManage,” notes Whitfield.
“The introductory training we received from SAManage was very good,” adds Whitfield. “And because configuration and setup were well-defined for tracking of IT Assets, I have been able to quickly move forward and start monitoring assets.”
According to Whitfield, it was important to CRW that SAManage was an on-demand solution: “We have enough installed products to manage. Software-As-a-Service models take a lot of the deployment grunt work out of the picture.”
Results
With SAManage in place, CRW is better able to track assets and generate the required reports. “SAManage helps us solidify assets tracking so we can start showing the correlation between the assets we are using and what’s in our accounting records,” says Whitfield.
SAManage will also help Whitfield educate users to minimize the exposure to malicious software, which could pose a risk to the entire network. “SAManage gives us the visibility to see if any computers are running applications they are not supposed to, so we can work with the users to remove these risks.”
In addition, Whitfield is expecting SAManage to provide a boost to the use of a help desk application for reporting incidents by users. “We currently use SharePoint for our help desk. Even after a few years, only 10% of the organization actually uses it, while the rest still resort to email and phone calls which are difficult to track and manage. I believe these people will be more likely to use an application such as SAManage with a professionally-looking, easy-to-access user interface for submitting and tracking IT incidents.”
The integrated help desk and asset management solution will also enable CRW to tie incident information to specific hardware and software assets. “This will help us better assess which computers may require an upgrade,” explains Whitfield.
