While many organizations have effective, static operational security performance measures in place, their corresponding metrics and reports focus on the high-level insights provided by Microsoft SCCM—such as information about software updates. Yet these metrics don’t provide any depth or transparency.

Microsoft SCCM reporting has its place, but alone doesn’t reveal how security teams currently help the business assess risk against vulnerabilities and compliance, or how they can drive future strategy. For example, a typical Microsoft SCCM report might indicate that a number of software updates are required, but it’s difficult to grasp the business impact of this number at the executive level.

What’s needed in this context are insights around real-time patch levels and which business applications are affected so that business stakeholders can spot moments of importance and make connections among them. Displaying when vendors make those software updates available and how quickly they are addressed afterwards helps executives better understand the security risks—and make appropriate, fact-based security decisions. Such an accurate picture improves response to vulnerabilities and demonstrates how security is focused on an organization’s critical risks.

The Most Valuable Security Reports Offer In-Depth Insights

Dashboards and reports that clearly communicate what matters most to each manager viewing the data—the CIO, CSO, or CEO—are essential in your mission to secure your organization. The most valuable security reports are those that can improve the accuracy of risk assessments—by showing, for example, the time required to patch for critical vulnerabilities and how that translates into business impact. Dashboards of value highlight areas to drive improvements.

In her April 4, 2018 blog post “Security Reporting and Analytics with Xtraction: Make Security Data Work for You,” Ivanti senior manager of product marketing, Melanie Karunaratne, writes that there are three key areas for reporting that provide focus for the outcomes you need to achieve:

  1. “Assess how your environment is performing against the top 5 Critical Security Controls as defined by the Center for Internet Security. Build your defenses.
  2. Know the age of missing patches from your endpoints to realize the attack area and restrict your threat exposure.
  3. Ensure data governance. Achieve different goals and perspectives from the same core data records, without compromising that data.”

Yet Melanie also points out that organizations are trying to meet security specifications with inadequate resources, compounded by the number of cybersecurity solutions IT is attempting to manage. She writes that in a recent Ivanti webinar survey, over 40 percent of respondents indicated they are juggling five security solutions or more. “What’s crystal clear,” she says, “is that these solutions—each with their own reporting interfaces—fail to provide a complete, integrated view of the risks to your environment.”

Extract Data from Multiple Sources and Extend the Value of SCCM Reporting

The encouraging news is that reporting tools from Ivanti make it simple for you to draw from multiple data sources to generate reports that contain the information that matters to you and your audience.

Ivanti® Xtraction is a self-service, real-time reporting and dashboard solution that helps you meet your IT business intelligence needs—without waiting for an expert to do it. You can drill down to the tiniest detail and do more with less prep. Which means, it’s easy for anyone to pull together data from multiple security solutions into one place to view and analyze.

Xtraction’s pre-built data connectors bring together that security and other IT data from multiple vendors’ tools and multiple enterprise applications—each with its own reporting interface—into a single, consolidated view instantly without coding, business intelligence gurus, or spreadsheets. Merge your vendor tools data—including Ivanti tools—in one place.

You can pull together and display data from enterprise systems for security management, IT service management, IT asset management, client management, and more.

Take some time to learn more about the capabilities of Ivanti Xtraction on our web page, where you can also request a demo.