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What is IRAP Assessment? What to Know About the Latest Compliance for Ivanti Neurons

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:24:30 Z

The Australian Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessment is an essential tool for organisations looking to ensure their security posture meets the highest standards.

This assessment, which Ivanti Neurons for IT Service Management (ITSM) and Ivanti Neurons for IT Asset Management (ITAM) went through, is one of the most stringent security assessments available.

The IRAP assessment process

The IRAP program is administered by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), a division of the Australian Signals Directorate. The ACSC is responsible for the security of the Australian government’s information and IT systems, and the IRAP assessment process.

The rigorous assessment process conducted by an approved IRAP assessor includes assessing existing policies and procedures, conducting vulnerability scans, and reviewing security measures.

Ivanti Neurons’ IRAP assessment

Under the IRAP assessment, conducted by Aegis9 during the period February to May 2023, using the June 2022 version of the Australian Information Security Manual (ISM) and in line with the ACSC’s Cloud Security Guidance, Ivanti Neurons for ITSM and ITAM were assessed against the requirements to hold, process and communicate Australian government information classified up to and including “PROTECTED.”

Ivanti Neurons for ITSM and ITAM has been assessed in the following areas:

Protection of government and citizen data. Ivanti provides a secure platform for the storage and retrieval of personal and sensitive data.
Secure access to systems. Ivanti uses strong authentication methods and access control measures to ensure that only authorised users can access the system.
Network and system protection. Ivanti provides a robust system for protecting networks and systems from malicious attacks and intrusions.
Security monitoring. Ivanti is equipped with advanced security monitoring capabilities, allowing organisations to monitor their systems and networks for any suspicious activity.

In addition to IRAP assessment, Ivanti Neurons also holds certifications from several other leading organisations, including ISO/IEC 27001:2013, GDPR compliance, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA Compliance, and FedRAMP Certification.

What Ivanti’s IRAP assessment means for government agencies and public-sector organisations

Federal departments, state agencies and critical infrastructure providers require the highest security standards. The IRAP assessment demonstrates the strong commitment Ivanti has to meeting those strict standards.

Government agencies are continually striving to increase efficiency and reduce costs. To achieve this, they are frequently turning to cloud computing technologies such as SaaS to provide them with a modern platform that will enhance operational efficiency and reduce IT costs.

Ivanti Neurons for ITSM/ITAM is an advanced IT Service Management platform and enables government agencies to improve their Service Delivery across 11 ITIL practices, optimise their assets by understanding what they have, and improve the employee experience through the self-service portal and digital experience management.

In addition, using the same IRAP assessment platform, agencies can expand across to other areas such HR, Facilities, Governance Risk and Compliance, Project and Portfolio Management and Security Operations.

By using Ivanti Neurons for ITSM/ITAM, organisations can achieve their goals faster, improve employee experience and reduce their risk profile. The comprehensive suite of features offered includes automated processes and analytics capabilities that help minimise manual tasks associated with ensuring service quality.

This frees up customers to focus on providing superior customer experiences instead of managing complex back-end operations.

Furthermore, Ivanti Neurons for ITSM is designed to be easily deployable across multiple devices, providing customers with peace of mind that they are using a secure solution from start to finish. Ivanti is committed to assessing more solutions against the IRAP program. Ivanti Neurons for MDM (Mobile Device Management) is currently under IRAP assessment and Ivanti looks forward to sharing the results when complete.

Need additional information? Head over to the Ivanti IRAP page to learn more.

How to Use Generative AI for Knowledge Management

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:30:00 Z

In the blog “How Generative AI Can Benefit Knowledge Management”, we looked at the benefits of AI to knowledge management to enhance the quality, automating the creation of content and enabling more engaging content. In enabling generative AI to become part of the knowledge management framework introduces concerns about accuracy, data bias, privacy and security.

Now, it’s time to look at how we can make it work well together...

How to use generative AI with knowledge management

Despite concerns of using generative AI in daily operations, this technology has the potential to be a powerful tool to optimise knowledge management. By carefully considering the potential drawbacks and taking steps to mitigate them, organisations can use generative AI to improve their knowledge management practices.

Here are the five things to consider when using generative AI for knowledge management:

Making sure to identify the type of data that will be used to train the generative AI model. Identification of the data type will help to ensure that the data used is accurate and reliable. Are you going to be using existing knowledge articles, incident data, problem data or combinations of all?
Having identified the data type, generative AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. The old saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ still applies. Ensure that the data you've identified above is accurate, complete and up-to-date.
Monitoring the output of the generative AI model for signs of bias, misinformation, completeness and accuracy. This can help to ensure that the information generated by the model is reliable.
Developing policies and procedures to manage the risks associated with using generative AI for knowledge management. This is an important step in ensuring the success of your project. These policies and procedures should address issues such as data security, privacy and ethical considerations. They should be designed to ensure that using generative AI for knowledge management is conducted in a responsible and ethical way.
Putting an approval process in place before any knowledge information is shared publicly to ensure that the generated outputs are reviewed and authorised.

By taking these steps, organisations can use generative AI to improve their knowledge management practices while minimising the risks.

Combine generative AI and knowledge management with caution

The effectiveness and impact of generative AI on knowledge management will depend on how it's used and implemented. It's important to carefully evaluate the benefits and risks before deciding whether to incorporate it.

Here are some potential pros and cons:

Pros

1. Automatic generation of relevant content

Generative AI can be used to automatically create knowledge articles from existing data sources, such as product documentation, customer support tickets and employee training materials.

With 32% of IT professionals reporting an increase in helpdesk tickets since the move to remote working, there’s a significant opportunity for enhancement of the knowledge base that can enable quicker and more effective issue resolution, freeing up IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks, such as developing new knowledge management initiatives and improving the quality of existing knowledge articles.

2. Improved search accuracy

Generative AI can help improve search accuracy by personalising the delivery of knowledge to employees, based on their individual needs and preferences. With an average employee spending 3.6 hours a day searching for information, any time savings in the way knowledge is delivered to them is a win.

Enabling easier and quicker access to information will ultimately enhance your employees’ digital experience.

3. Enhanced automation

Generative AI can assist in automating routine task – even if it's not directly related to the creation of knowledge management articles.

With 85% of IT professionals rating automation and AI investments as profitable ventures, identifying new ways of streamlining their processes can free up time for IT professionals to focus on more complex issues.

Cons

1. Risk of misinformation

Generative AI can potentially produce incorrect or misleading information, which can lead to serious consequences in the IT field. For example, the introduction of malware, or the incorrectly recommending turning off functionality which is used to secure the IT environment from malicious actors.

2. Dependence on AI-generated content

If companies become too reliant on AI-generated content, they may not prioritise the human-generated one or critical thinking skills, leading to a potential loss of expertise. Despite all the discussion around generative AI, human oversight is still required to validate accuracy and approve the generated information.

3. Ethical concerns

There are ethical concerns surrounding the use of generative AI, like potential bias in the data used to train the model, which can perpetuate existing inequalities.

There’s no doubt that generative AI can be a valuable tool for IT knowledge management and while a new exciting technology, there's still much to be learned about the benefits and pitfalls that it may bring.

Each organisation needs to review the potential impact individually and choose an appropriate AI solution that meets their own need for privacy, accuracy and security.

Tips for implementing generative AI for knowledge management

Start small and scale up

It's better to start with a small pilot project and then scale up using generative AI as you gain experience.

Get buy-in from stakeholders

It's important to get buy-in from stakeholders before deploying generative AI in production. This will help ensure that the model is used effectively and that its outputs are trusted.

Monitor the model's performance

It's important to monitor the model's performance after it's been deployed in production. This will help identify any potential problems with the model and improve the model's accuracy.

Continuously improve the model

Generative AI models are constantly being improved. It's important to continuously enhance the model by retraining it on new data and addressing any potential problems that may occur.

Learn more about this topic – watch our webinar on Generative AI for InfoSec & Hackers: What Security Teams Need to Know.

How Generative AI Can Benefit Your Knowledge Management

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:24:02 Z

There has been growing interest in the capabilities of generative AI since the release of tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, Amazon Large Language Models and Microsoft Bing. With the hype comes concerns about privacy, PII, security and, even more importantly, accuracy. And rightly so.

Organizations are treading cautiously with their acceptance of generative AI tools, despite seeing them as a game changer. Many businesses are trying to find the sweet spot that enables them to capitalize on the benefits now, while identifying more strategic uses for generative AI for the future; all without compromising on security.

One area where immediate gains can be obtained within an organization is their knowledge management. This initiative has been challenging for many organizations, yet it’s one that can drive employee productivity and deliver significant benefits to support teams, who'd typically maintain knowledge manually.

How generative AI and knowledge management intersect

Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as images, text or even music, based on existing data. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and learn from large datasets. From there, it generates new content based on that analysis.

Knowledge management, on the other hand, is the process of capturing, organizing and sharing knowledge within an organization. It involves collecting information from various sources, storing it in a centralized database and making it easily accessible to employees when they need it.

Many organizations manually maintain their knowledge management, opening the door for out of date or poorly written content. By automating many of the tasks involved in knowledge management, generative AI can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your knowledge management processes.

Some of the specific ways in which generative AI can optimize knowledge management include:

1. Automating the creation of knowledge articles

Generative AI can automatically create knowledge articles from existing data sources, such as product documentation, customer support tickets and employee training materials. This automation can free up IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks, such as developing new knowledge management initiatives and improving the quality of existing knowledge articles.

2. Improving the quality of knowledge

Generative AI can improve the quality of knowledge by identifying and correcting errors, archiving old information, as well as by adding context and additional information to knowledge articles. This can help ensure that employees have access to accurate and up-to-date information.

3. Generate new ideas and insights

Generative AI can generate new ideas and insights by combining existing knowledge in new ways. For example, HR, facilities and IT all have articles that talk about onboarding and offboarding employees with an organization.

Generative AI may look at these and produce a merged knowledge article that discusses the end-to-end process of onboarding and offboarding across all three areas. This can save an employee from having to search across three different areas.

4. Solve problems more quickly

Generative AI can quickly solve problems by identifying patterns and trends in data. This can help organizations make better decisions and improve their overall performance.

For example, generative AI may look across IT incidents over a defined period of time and identify a common method of resolution for a group of common issues. Based on its findings, it can generate a knowledge article for service desk agents to resolve issues quicker, and for employees to resolve them themselves via self-service.

5. Create more engaging content

Generative AI can create more engaging content by personalizing it for each user, helping organizations improve their customer experience. Knowledge articles, particularly within HR knowledge, are personalized based on region or language. Being able to generate content unique to their persona will greatly enhance the use and experience to the employee.

What are the drawbacks to generative AI?

Generative AI solutions paired with knowledge management have the potential to revolutionize many industries and fields. However, it isn't without its drawbacks, including:

1. Security and privacy

Generative AI systems used for knowledge management may contain sensitive or confidential information. So, it's crucial to ensure that they are secure and protected against cyberthreats. Additionally, there may be concerns around privacy, particularly if the AI is generating content that includes personal or identifying information.

For example, generative AI can create realistic-looking malware and phishing attacks. These attacks can be used to steal personal information, financial data or other sensitive information.

2. Quality and accuracy

While generative AI models can produce impressive outputs, their quality and accuracy can vary widely depending on the input data and the complexity of the task. The old saying of "garbage in, garbage out" still applies. It can also be difficult to ensure that the AI has access to accurate and up-to-date information, which can affect the quality of what it generates.
For example, training data for ChatGPT is collected from the internet and updated regularly. However, the current version of ChatGPT is trained on data that was collected up to September 2021. This means that ChatGPT may not be able to answer questions about current events or topics that have been in the news since September 2021.

3. Data bias

Generative AI models can inadvertently reflect the biases and prejudices present in the data they're trained on, leading to biased or inaccurate results. This data bias is especially concerning in knowledge management applications, where accuracy is critical.
For example, if a model is trained on a dataset of text that's predominantly from the United States, the model may be less likely to generate text relevant to people from other countries.

Generative AI provides an organization with opportunities to enhance knowledge management through improved quality, engaging content and automation. But there are cautions along the way. Learn what you need to have in place to successfully use generative AI with knowledge management in your organisation.

The Need for Enterprise Service Management

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 14:42:49 Z

Key takeaways

ESM is the practice of managing technology services to ensure that they meet the needs of the organization and its employees.
It ensures services are delivered consistently, efficiently and cost-effectively – while meeting the needs of the business and customers.
The benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) include increased employee satisfaction, boosted employee engagement, reduced costs, increased efficiency and improved compliance.
Comprehensive processes and automation help ensure your organization provides the highest quality of service to customers while optimizing available resources.
There are four key components of an effective ESM strategy: clear goals and objectives, comprehensive processes, automation and monitoring and feedback.

Organizations today are becoming more reliant on technology to provide quality services to their employees. As a result, there is an increased need for Enterprise Service Management (ESM).

What is Enterprise Service Management?

ESM is a set of processes and practices used for managing the delivery of an organization’s technology services. ESM ensures services are delivered consistently, efficiently and cost-effectively – while meeting the needs of the organization and customers.

Employees expect a similar experience in their day-to-day business life, whether they engage with IT or any of the many other service providers in a company. This includes human resources (HR), Legal, Facilities, project management, security, sales, marketing, R&D and finance departments.

Benefits of Enterprise Service Management

The benefits of Enterprise Service Management are numerous. Some of the most important include:

1. Improved employee satisfaction

ESM looks at how technology helps or hinders employees when doing the work they need to do - when they need to do it. ESM ensures services are delivered consistently and efficiently, leading to improved employee productivity and satisfaction. By providing clear expectations, enhancing communication and creating a sense of ownership, ESM enables employees to feel more engaged with the teams who are delivering the services they have requested.

For example, if an employee can see the status of a request, they know what stage it is in and when it can be expected to be finished This allows employees and business departments to focus more on providing business value and ensuring that IT boosts productivity versus hindering employee efficiency.

2. Boosted employee engagement

Delivering an omnichannel experience across a self-service portal, Microsoft Teams, virtual agent, and email allows employees to choose the way they work that best fits their needs and preferences, increasing their engagement by providing an easy way to find and request information and services across a variety of modes.

3. Reduced costs

ESM can help reduce costs significantly by streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary complexity. Automation is key here; ticket classification, assignment and flexible workflows can be automated, ensuring the right team is handling the ticket from the beginning. This not only reduces costs but leads to improved efficiency and customer satisfaction.

4. Increased efficiency

ESM helps increase efficiency and reduce errors by ensuring services are delivered on time and meet the organization's priorities. This can be achieved through standardized workflows, documented processes, automated assignments and interconnected systems, resulting in higher quality services across the organization.

5. Improved compliance

ESM enables organizations to meet industry regulations and standards. Through detailed auditing and reporting, organizations can ensure their compliance with service levels, security protocols and other regulations. This helps organizations protect their data and assets and gain

a competitive advantage in the market by ensuring compliance with relevant regulations.

Features of an effective Enterprise Service Management strategy

Employees expect easy and instant access to IT and non-IT services and automatic fulfilling of their requests.

While the IT service desk or help desk are top of mind when discussing service management, this is only one element for an ESM strategy. Some other key capabilities, which are an opportunity for introducing Enterprise Service Management to non-IT services, include:

Self-service portal.
Easy knowledge access.
Ticket automation.
Case management.

An effective ESM strategy must have four key components:

1. Clear goals and objectives

It is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of an organization's goals and objectives when it comes to ESM. This could begin with Human Resources (HR) or Facilities having an explicit idea of advantages.

To start small, if email is the normal form of communication, it would make sense to incorporate automated email creation into the new ESM platform and implement the self-service portal or virtual agent as a second step.

However, it is even more important to enhance the backend processes by utilizing automation and workflow technology. This will allow for streamlined operations and more efficient processes, resulting in greater productivity.

Additionally, having a well-defined ESM strategy helps ensure the organization keeps up with the ever-changing needs of the customer base and offers high-quality service all the time.

2. Comprehensive processes

From the initial design to the final delivery, ESM processes should be comprehensive and detailed, encompassing a wide range of service delivery stages. It is important to document and outline the services and processes that your organization plans to offer. These services and processes may be limited at first, but they will inevitably expand as your organization matures.

Additionally, it is essential to identify the most significant processes that will give the best employee satisfaction and the highest efficiencies. Having comprehensive processes in place helps ensure your organization can provide the highest quality of service to the customers while optimizing the resources available.

3. Automation

Enabling automation in your organization will streamline processes and reduce errors. Automatically assigning work to the right team will significantly reduce response and resolution time and improve turnaround time for customer requests. Workflows that automatically manage approvals, tasks and notifications help maintain high levels of accuracy and quality.

Combining automation with existing manual steps will significantly improve the speed, accuracy and quality of organizational operations and improve the employee experience.

4. Monitoring and feedback

It is important to monitor the performance of ESM processes and provide feedback to ensure that they are meeting the organization's goals and objectives. To do this effectively, it is necessary to put in place dashboards, analytics and other reporting tools that will provide visibility into the team's workload and identify any imbalances or inconsistencies.

Monitoring will help you observe any trends or changes in workload, and measure how well service level targets are being met. This helps ensure that all organizational goals and objectives are achieved. Additionally, it gives managers the ability to make better decisions on how to adjust and prioritize resources accordingly.

The need for Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is becoming increasingly important as organizations become more reliant on technology to provide quality services to their employees.

ESM can help to reduce costs, improve employee satisfaction, and increase efficiency, while also ensuring that an organization is compliant with industry regulations and standards. An effective ESM strategy must include clear goals and objectives, comprehensive processes, automation, monitoring and feedback.

From improving employee satisfaction to significantly reducing cost, implementing an effective ESM strategy helps your organization stay productive and efficient in this new era of Everywhere Work. As IT’s responsibility for managing non-IT assets grows, ESM will help IT teams broaden their influence and deliver business value to the organization. Learn more about how Ivanti can help with your Enterprise Service Management strategy.

Improving the Employee Experience with Proactive Service Management

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 20:36:19 Z

Recently I was thinking about the topic “How do you improve the employee experience”. Many organisations drive this from an IT perspective with concepts like a Self-Service Portal, or Teams Channels, chatbots, even Social IT boards. And these are all great ideas, but are they truly addressing employee experience?

Let me elaborate on this concept. I have a friend who uses Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, they have a fantastic Self-Service Portal which allows them to create issues, search the knowledge base, and make service requests such as ordering a new computer. And the 2 or 3 times he has used the Self-Service Portal and interacted with IT he has been happy.

Poor Employee Experience

But when I asked him what he thought of IT, he said they were never proactive, and he was always having issues with his computer. What? Why? Two weeks earlier, he caught the train into the city, the trip is about 1.5 hours and he had time to work, so out came his laptop and started working, 30 minutes later the laptop battery ran out of juice and he could not continue working. 3 days later when he powered up his laptop, he received the message “Your battery can no longer provide sufficient power to your system and needs to be replaced”. Six Months earlier he had issues with Blue Screen crashes and his motherboard. After the battery issue, he went to the self-service portal, created an issue with IT, who then told him the laptop needed to be replaced and to raise a service request for a replacement laptop.

Now IT were very quick in identifying what needed to be done and responding to my friend. Within the context of the issue, they did a good job. But my friend was still unhappy with IT. His first comment to me was why couldn’t they be proactive and know about these issues before he did.

I put a question back to him. If the service management from IT was proactive and could see these issues before you did, and even order you a replacement part, or order a new computer without you having to do that, how would you rate them? His comment was a simple 10 out 10. Excellent.

Shift Left

Many organisations talk about the concept of “Shift Left”. What this is trying to do, is focus on service excellence and end user empowerment. By just empowering the end user, this only moves the process a very small amount to the left. The largest shift left is proactive identification and resolution of the issues.

Automation and Self-Healing

Let’s put this into action using Ivanti Neurons for Healing and see what the process can look like.

An automation process executes against a laptop and based on this process identifies battery health as poor, terrible, or no longer useable.
The results of this then sends a message to the laptop owner via Microsoft teams notifying them of this issue and what would they like to do. In this case we ask the owner
1. Notify IT of the Issue
2. Request a New laptop
3. Ignore the issue for now
As a result of this Teams interaction, the automation process will either
1. Create a service request for a new laptop
2. Notify IT of the issue
3. Ignore the issue for a while longer
Now of course you could skip the Microsoft Teams interaction but having that notification capability keeps the user engaged and aware of what is happening, and proactively involved.

Putting this all together what does this automation process look like?

The concept of this move shift left, is to enable the user to work without distraction and interruption. How many times do we as users google how to fix something on our work laptop? And why because we feel we can get this resolved immediately ourselves, rather than logon to the self-service portal, log an issue, wait for an IT person to reply, arrange a common time for the IT person to remote into your computer, try the same things you have and then tell you what you already know.

Think about the different issues you have had recently, or maybe colleagues have had. Let’s list a few;

Battery Health. Already spoken about that, but the reality is users don’t know about their battery health until they need the battery, and sometimes that is during an important presentation.
Print Spooler. A topical and recent issue, where the Windows 10 Print Spooler recently had a vulnerability. Many IT organisations turned off the print spooler, and users found this out when they went to print. Imagine not being able to print that report you were about to give to the CIO.
Blue Screen crashes: How often do you immediately log an issue with IT when you get a blue screen crash. Typically, it would take 3 to 5 times before you say enough is enough. But if this happens automatically behind the scenes the automation creates an IT Issue, and they are aware the first time.
Application Crashes. Again, how quickly do you really get around to telling IT that the Application crashes. Often this one goes undetected until you are discussing this over the watercooler.

Now I have only listed four scenarios, and I am sure that you can list so many more. There are so many niggling untold stories that often never get to IT. Imagine knowing about these issues before the employee raised it, and even better resolving it proactively. Ivanti Neurons for Healing comes with many predefined checks, like the above and many more, or you can build your own.

A 360-degree view

Automation and Self-Healing are two very key aspects of driving a better employee experience and another area to consider is having a 360-degree view of the employee. All Service Management platforms have data about an employee they can tell you their name, email, phone, manager, location, building, the incidents and requests they are requested, and even the assets they own. Whilst this data is useful, it is static or historical data. How much better would it be if we can get a real time view about the user, the devices, and what is happening at that time. Incidents logged, performance of the laptop, and other information.

Ivanti Neurons Workspace enables you a view of the users device and detailed information like performance, recent Incidents logs, software, patches etc. This information gives an IT Analyst in-depth and powerful real-time information which they can use to quickly identify and remediate.

The New Employee Experience

Finally, what if we could understand the real employee experience? In nearly all service management platforms this is achieved via sending surveys in response to Issues or Requests. These are great as point in time views, but do not give a true holistic view of a user’s experience. As we discussed earlier with my friend, he was not happy with IT due to the issues he was having with his computer. If we could bring together all that information into one place and using analytics give a score across areas of an employee, then we can have an employee index that gives is the ultimate view of the employee.

At Ivanti we are putting the employee first, and through improving employee experience, we can empower everyone in the everywhere workplace. Learn more about the Ivanti Neurons solution and how it will help you.