A Journey to Transparency and Automation with 1E

Early on in 1E’s implementation, an app called ZScaler prompted a P1 or P2 support ticket escalation in their environment. ZScaler, a third-party application, was prompting some users to log in for no apparent reason – an issue that continued for a week.

Because ZScaler originated outside of the organization, its behavior presented a security challenge for the immediate security team. As a proxy app, it channels internet traffic to prevent visits to certain websites to protect networks. Multiple teams set about trying to understand why it might be prompting some users to log in and troubleshooting began.

The team closest to the 1E implementation decided to look at how 1E’s Endpoint Troubleshooting could help. They compared endpoint information in one central place in 1E and quickly identified a change in the logs. It showed that an unattended update had been pushed by the vendor, but the vendor hadn’t informed the security team, so no update had been expected or subsequently reviewed.

Another clear example of 1E’s value comes in the form of a P2 support ticket escalation in response to the need to remove a Salesforce Chrome browser extension. The Chrome extension was being pushed out via a group policy object (GPO) from Microsoft across the environment. A support ticket was raised by a group of users to remove it from their devices, spawning an emergency change request on the priority support ticket.

On the ground, team leaders didn’t realize that anyone in the organization could install Chrome extensions, so IT didn’t know how many users were affected outside of the group raising tickets.

“We quickly identified that the action required was to disable the GPO, but we simply didn’t know who had the extension installed on their browser”

Using 1E, the Digital Workplace team were able to run a report to see who had the extension within the environment – something they couldn’t have done any other way. They were then able to discover affected endpoints and remediate the issue on those machines, fast. “1E gave us endpoint insights we couldn’t previously access, resolving this issue across networks with minimum fuss or further investigation.”

By getting new levels of visibility and transparency to feed the troubleshooting process for intermittent or inconsistent issues, the IT team can now quickly identify the differences in endpoint machines and locate the root cause.

That translates into remediation and ticket resolution that’s faster than ever. “Our new troubleshooting process is often as simple as ‘find the issue, target impacted users with 1E and deploy the fix’. It’s as easy as that for us now”

It has also facilitated new relationships – or opened up new facets to relationships – between IT and the rest of the business. IT teams have been able to tell the security team about the impacts 1E has had on the wider organization’s estate by increasing endpoint visibility. IT can now centralize support for all business units and give them the benefits of greater transparency, delivering end-to-end value across the organization.