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.