For organizations that have 100% cloud based IT infrastructure, one key responsibility for the in-house IT team is security. Making sure that only the right people have access to the right information requires constant juggling as new documents are created, apps are added or retired, and as staff members are hired or leave.

Challenge:

Philip Zhou, Senior IT Manager for Narvar, sets the scene: Because Narvar is SaaS-forward and operating without on-premise infrastructure, they consider themselves “a pure cloud company — so reliability is not our main focus for IT.”  The primary, day-to-day responsibility for IT is security:  

“Before BetterCloud, I had two recurring challenges. One of them was how to make sure that the right people had access to documents and then figuring out where those documents were. Who owned what?” The previous solution used by Narvar was not user-friendly. For example, when employees needed access to a document, permission requests might be sent all the way up to the CEO, creating a bottleneck and frustration for all. “Without BetterCloud, it was very hard to track who owned a document or verify why they needed it.”

“Another challenge was making sure users have proper permission to access the proper SaaS applications.” This includes permissioning and depermissioning, on-boarding and off-boarding, and also permissions within the system. According to Zhou, “That’s why BetterCloud is very critical for us on a daily basis. I think half of our daily tickets are requesting access for different SaaS systems.”

“Our business grows very quickly, but our IT team doesn’t. That’s one reason we rely on the tools from BetterCloud,” notes Zhou.

Solution:

“With BetterCloud, it’s easy to figure out the document ID,” reports Zhou. “We see a document ‘owned’ by the CEO, put it in BetterCloud, and it’s probably transferred from an ex-employee. We can grant the access we think is proper.” As it turns out, the CEO was getting a lot of requests.

Another advantage Narvar has found is auditing files. IT needed to identify how many documents had sharing opened to the whole company — because many people mistakenly clicked on sharing and shared the documents as read-only. The CEO brought up this issue when he noticed many documents that were being shared with the entire company weren’t supposed to be. With BetterCloud, they can quickly close all those mistaken link shares.

BetterCloud helps Narvar manage different SaaS platforms, which gives them more functionality and greater control, especially for auditing. They use the new connectors in BetterCloud for updating new SaaS applications, including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack. For example, audits give them visibility into active and inactive licenses for the various SaaS applications. 

“Having one place to manage all the different platforms increases the efficiency of IT,” notes Zhou.

Faster, more central control to contain costs and improve security

Also, before BetterCloud, IT had to manually control and report on different platforms. Because each platform typically needs a license per user, there were unnecessary costs incurred for unused licenses. Additionally, there were extra costs for each IT team member to be able to close or create accounts for team access. With many administrators on different platforms, this was not only costly, but insecure. By using BetterCloud, IT now creates one super administrator on each platform. Zhou happily reports that, “We save on licenses for the IT team and also make the whole system more secure and more trackable for auditing.”

Summing up, Zhou reports, “The platform is very user-friendly for the IT administrators because it uses the traditional IT methodology or terms to separate different features.”

“I really appreciate the BetterCloud support team. I’ve created a lot of support tickets for different questions and requirements, and they are always very responsive,” Zhou states.

Results:

• Increase IT efficiency, with a single location to manage multiple platforms 

• Enhance security with automatic alerts — especially during off-boarding — helping ensure all security steps

• Find and solve security issues caused by incorrect access settings — to employees, contractors, and the public

• Quickly conduct access audits to find errors and inactive accounts 

• Dependable endpoint security system for internal audits and complete documentation for external auditors

“I really like how you guys keep improving your platform. You’re adding features, you’re adding connectors, you’re adding templates, and also, you are adding the certificates. I did become BetterCloud certified.”

Philip Zhou, Senior IT Manager