Achieving ISO 27001 with ALVAO ITSM tool: The Sapio story

About Sapio 

Sapio, an independent Australian human-powered security company, delivers forward-looking smart security  solutions. Their primary focus lies in electronic security (such as CCTV and access control), monitoring, and innovative technologies for comprehensive security management to protect and support businesses across Australia.

Sapio sought a comprehensive IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, Asset Management and Service Desk to help them achieve critical ISO 27001 certification. Additionally, they aimed to reduce the workload of their IT department, which consisted of five people managing a ticketing system through their current CRM system. The existing situation wasn’t sufficient to meet ISO 27001's strict requirements.

• From the Service Desk perspective, Sapio needed intuitive, easy-to-use, and secure software to manage change management transparently.
• From the Asset Management perspective, they required a clear overview of software, such as software licences and IT contracts, and hardware assets to have an overview of their stock to create purchase order numbers. All for accountability and easy auditability.

Challenges related to ISO 27 001

Cumbersome Excel sheets for tracking software licences and IT contracts, inadequate for ISO 27001

Tracking assets to ensure smooth audits is extremely important for gaining the certification. Sapio manually entered data about software licences, IT contracts, other software assets and security reviews with vendors in multiple Excel sheets and SharePoint sites. The IT team struggled to keep asset information up to date due to manual corrections. This led to human errors and inappropriate asset tracking, resulting in poor data quality. Excel sheets and SharePoint sites for asset tracking were unlikely to meet the strict requirements for ISO 27001 certification.

“Prior to implementing ALVAO, we had no asset management or proper asset management, other than spreadsheets,” comments Nigel Seager, ICT manager at Sapio.

Limited ticketing module within Sapio's CRM system

The absence of dedicated IT services was a challenge. Since our CRM primarily focuses on sales, the IT team was forced to use unsuitable system that couldn’t adequately support their efforts to achieve ISO 27001 certification.

“I think our CRM is a great sales tool. It's not designed as an ITSM service desk. It lacked that integration to assets, and it was always hard to find tickets,” states Nigel.

IT team overloaded due to absence of service catalogue

The IT support team faced overload due to user tickets handled via emails, chats in Teams, phone calls or even through typical walk-ins. “For us, ALVAO filled the gaps within the business that we didn't have coverage for,” notes Nigel.

IT support had to manually enter all information into the system resulting in unreported incidents, changes, chaos, prolonged resolution times, and challenges in conducting audits and reports for ISO 27001.

Solution

Sapio has implemented the comprehensive ALVAO ITSM solution, which includes Service Desk and IT Asset Management. Nigel reflects that ITSM tools were often prohibitively costly for an organisation of this size, or not scalable to the needs of their business.

"One of the challenges was to find an ITSM tool, that delivered the necessary aspects to meet our ISO 27001 journey however one that would not be cost prohibitive for a SME to implement. We looked at several of the more common ITSM tools, and given the size of the price tag (once all modules turned on) we couldn’t justify the ROI. With ALVAO, it fitted nicely into the price point required for our business and therefore was an easier item for the CFO to sign off from an ROI perspective," explains Nigel.

Besides, this strategic move addresses the challenges mentioned earlier and serves multiple purposes:

• ISO 27001 certification support: The ALVAO solution facilitates the achievement of ISO 27001 certification for Sapio.
• Migration from the CRM: Sapio transitioned from the CRM to a dedicated IT system.
• Workload ease: The ALVAO implementation streamlines work for Sapio’s IT team and other affected departments.
• Cross-department implementation: Thanks to ALVAO’s elastic licensing model, every user can also act as an agent. 

“We've implemented ALVAO so that we can scale it up and down as needed. We're gonna roll ALVAO out to other departments because that's the nice thing, that it's not licensed just per agent,” explains Nigel.

ALVAO Agent and Microsoft Intune integration

Nigel also appreciates how good the ALVAO Agent is with helping to add assets and provide information about these assets including installed software. The additional information provided by Microsoft Intune integration complements the ALVAO Agent, non-PC devices such as Mobile phones are automatically added to ALVAO and updated by Intune.

Enhancing asset inventory

Sapio has improved control over managed tangible and intangible IT assets through automated collection of information about HW configuration and installed software products on stations.

More about Intune

Streamlined licence distribution and software audits

IT teams gained a clear visibility over license distribution and insights that helped them with SW audits.

“We have contracts that we also use to remind us when to do security reviews on vendors. These vendors are listed as assets, either as software or vendor assets. We use ALVAO to create reminders for when we need to run annual reviews,” explains Nigel.

More about SAM

Service Desk solution

Implementation of change management

The IT team now enjoys a crucial single point of contact that is intuitive and user-friendly. "ALVAO got us from most of the problems we were in,” points out Nigel. Thanks to the implementation of proper change management as one of the ISO 27001 requirements, Sapio has achieved the certification

More about Service Desk

User friendly service catalogue and self-service portal for everyone

The defined and organized service catalogue provides clear and accurate information about the IT department’s services and their quality. Users can easily submit tickets, eliminating the need for walk-ins, calls and emails.

ALVAO Microsoft integrations – Teams and Outlook

Sapio has integrated ALVAO with Teams, allowing users to contact IT directly through this platform. With this integration, Sapio can create tickets based on user messages without leaving Teams while working within the Service Desk.

“ALVAO gave us the flexibility to really fine-tune it to our business needs and not go over the top. The fact that ALVAO integrates seamlessly with Office 365, the Microsoft Environment, and fitted our business requirements. It was perfect.”

Customer-driven implementation process and great ideas

Sapio positively rates the quick implementation process and customer support that helped Sapio to promptly implement necessary process for the certification. “Jiri Janku and the implementation team were fantastic. Always there to answer questions, always helpful. If he doesn't know, he comes back pretty quick with an answer."

Sapio also appreciates the wide ALVAO customer community. Customers can propose improvement ideas and contribute to the enhancement of our products. Our development team takes these suggestions into consideration for product improvement. 

“Even the fact you have ideas section. You allow your users out there to vote on ideas. There's a few I voted on. It's nice that even after I vote I see other people's comments and stuff. I think it shows that you care about your users and you're looking for the feedback to enhance the product even further.”

Conclusion 

Sapio will further continue to implement more internal process into ALVAO such as HR processes, especially the onboarding and offboarding process which are complex to handle.

As Nigel states: “It's a great product that you should be very proud of what you've created.”

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