GITEX GLOBAL 2021 has come to an End! A big thanks to our partners and visitors for taking the time to come & meet us. Being the biggest trade show in the region, GITEX gave us the right platform to unveil our latest AI-powered offerings, AIOps and ServiceOps, which we are positioning as a unified solution to meet the challenges faced by enterprises due to the rapid modernization of their businesses.

It’s the scariest time of year. But forget about ghosts and goblins and zombies. If you really want to be as scary as possible this spooky season, we know exactly what your costume should be and how you should decorate your yard. Here are some hints: What are they? Cybersecurity threat actors. *Cue terrifying music.* Before you roll your eyes, stick with us. This is worth a quick read.

There are three aspects of co-existence to discuss. The gateway deployment co-existence, the end user workflow co-existence, and the administrative management co-existence. We will walk through all three of these aspects.

Ivanti Application Control is known for enabling IT control over endpoints, reducing security risk, and providing a great user experience. Up to now, that experience has always been for users of Windows environments. But with the introduction of Ivanti App Control for Linux, we are opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Ivanti Application Control for Linux brings the major benefits of App Control for Windows to Linux environments.

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, improving the customer experience is critical. Nowhere is this more important than in the healthcare industry, where increased engagement can lead to better patient outcomes. “Pairing digital technologies with human coaching and clinical care can offer a dramatically better patient experience through personalized attention, on-demand access to support, and automated reminders,” explains a Workflow article.

Inventory is an important task that every company must perform at least once a year in order to verify the quantity of its inventory. Its realization has a direct impact on the company’s future financial decisions.

When measuring the success of large-scale transformations—particularly in the technology space—it’s natural to look at hard metrics, such as cycle time, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and so on. In IT, for example, hard metrics are what we do all day long. But within any organization, change is ultimately personal. In my experience, relying exclusively on hard numbers often leads you to ignore the human side of transformation, and sometimes even action the wrong things.

For even the most successful IT organizations, providing innovative solutions is only half the battle. There’s one thing that matters above all else when it comes to solving IT problems: the perspective of the employees.

We’re strengthening the value to ServiceNow and ScienceLogic customers through a stronger partnership.

The new major release of Ivanti Desktop & Server Management (DSM) is now available! This release focuses on more cloud functionality and therefore moves DSM to the future. We have greatly enhanced the DSM connector for Ivanti Neurons to use the collected DSM data directly in Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence. This will allow you to have a much better overview of your environment from the security side.

It does this by delivering automated insight into your risk exposure and helps you to prioritize, based on adversarial risk. In particular, it provides real-time intelligence on vulnerability exploits that are actively trending in the wild, and those that have ties to ransomware.. Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence combines this risk-based prioritization with patch reliability data to help you focus your testing efforts and reduce the overall time to patch.

Where were you when VPN went from "nice to have for IT staff to remote in on the weekends" to "mission critical for the entire organization" almost overnight in March of 2020? Many companies were caught off-guard, with admins across the country taking a mad scramble to make sure their VPN solution is modern, sized to fit the demands of the remote workforce, and secure for their users.

ITSM’s fundamental processes around request management, incident management, change management, and maintaining a CMDB all provide essential support services to enterprise business processes and employees. These are some of IT’s “run the business” functions that can consume 57% of IT’s resources by one benchmark and be a lot higher for organizations that aren’t investing heavily in digital transformation.

I am excited to announce the launch of our latest network security offering known as Ivanti Neurons for Secure Access (nSA). This new cloud-based management solution will allow our existing L3 VPN customers using Connect Secure to take the next step in their journey toward a zero trust architecture. And this all can happen while still utilize existing Connect Secure VPNs that are already setup and configured.

Identity and Access Management involves a series of complex and organisational challenges. This brings together people from the whole organisation to engage in workflow management and decision making. Where the tools at hand lack the capacity to integrate key stakeholders into the communication and the decision-making process, the organization suffers.

It's time to talk about a new amazing number (a number I'm very proud of) - the number 10. '10' is not the new version number of Ivanti Device & Application Control - 10 is the number of new features and functionality that we have delivered with our latest product release! We have used all of your valuable feedback to create an even more valuable version of Ivanti Device and Application Control with release 5.4.

Organizations across all industries are investing in digital transformation to unlock new levels of innovation, agility, and productivity as they look to adapt to the new world of hybrid work. According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is projected to reach $4.1 trillion by the end of this year.1 However, many organizations are still struggling to identify where to start as they race to modernize systems of record and digitize operations.

Lisa Wolfe, product marketing director at ServiceNow, co-wrote this blog. The stream of global disruptions these past couple of years has not only put business continuity plans to the test, but has also tested the ability of organizations to simply survive. To operate at the “speed of a digital business” and to endure the next wave of unexpected change will require peripheral vision—the ability to help predict and fix issues before they impact employees or the business.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have realized the importance of proactively managing risk and security to build resilience and to emerge from a crisis stronger. These best practices and tools can help you shift your risk management program into high gear.

In our final episode of The Change Makers, we learn that with enough ambition, drive, and backing, IT practitioners can challenge the status quo and create a new era of IT efficiency. “Transformation isn’t a start and a stop process. It’s a continuous evolution, continuous change.” That’s Derek Rose, Group Head of IT and Deputy CIO at V.Group. After joining the maritime services company in 2019, he set about overhauling its entire IT operations.

Education project management software can transform learning experiences. Before the use of software, educational teams collaborated in meetings rooms and teacher lounges, and student reports were sent home to parents in crisp brown envelopes. Those days are gone. Times are changing and educators now have a wide range of digital collaboration tools to choose from.

Since 2003, with the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), October has been recognized as National Cyber Security Awareness Month. As with other important issues that have “designated months,” like Bullying Prevention Month and Domestic Violence Awareness Month (both also recognized in October), these are issues that deserve year-round attention, not limited to 31 days in October.

It’s a fact of life, enterprises are facing a growing onslaught of risk every day. Risk is everywhere, from the most visible ransomware attacks to the more subtle changing and growing technology landscape that introduces new challenges. According to a recent article, ransomware attacks have already increased by over 93% since the beginning of 2021.

KPIs and Metrics are Essential Transformation Yardsticks—But So Is Experience. Although many IT leaders launch into projects with set goals, there’s no telling what sort of unexpected consequences will emerge. In episode 4 of The Change Makers podcast, you’ll see how you can plan and predict certain benefits, but several successful business outcomes arrive serendipitously. Take Lucy Hallam, Service Desk Manager at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust.

The new world of hybrid work requires creative ways to engage with customers and employees no matter where they’re located. To answer that call, we’ve launched the ServiceNow Messaging Service to provide a seamless experience from issue to resolution. Built on integration with the Twilio platform, ServiceNow Messaging Service makes it easy for ServiceNow users to integrate SMS and WhatsApp into digital workflows using the Now Platform.

Small and large businesses alike are looking toward the future and are hoping for the economy to reopen as quickly and smoothly as possible. High vaccination rates will be key. The world’s biggest workflow challenge to convert vaccines into vaccinations has brought employers to the front line to drive the pandemic response effort. With more employers and governments now requiring employee vaccinations as a condition of work or office reentry, employee access to vaccines will become critical.

If you read our earlier blog “The Common Issues with Operating Multiple IT Service Desk Tools,” then you’re hopefully better aware of all the issues caused by running multiple service desk tools and potentially now looking at how to justify an ITSM tool consolidation project. To help, this blog shares some of the key opportunities to create a compelling business case for change.

This week is Cybersecurity Career Awareness Week, which is part of October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month. We sat down with Daniel Spicer, chief security officer at Ivanti, to learn more about what it’s like to work in the cybersecurity world.

COVID-19 has impacted every industry, but perhaps none more than healthcare and life sciences. From how and where healthcare is provided to the speed of developing and administering vaccines, there has been massive disruption to the way healthcare and life sciences organizations operate. But the crisis also provided unprecedented opportunities to reexamine and transform.

The 2021 Now at Work Digital Experience included a series of regional events with locally relevant topics and featured leaders from the business, government, and sports communities. Guest speakers, industry luminaries, partners, and customers sharing their success stories joined in the worldwide movement to workflow a better world.

The Seattle-based cloud services engineering team at ServiceNow has cultivated a culture of creativity, risk-taking, and problem-solving—despite the weight of their work being deployed at a global scale across some of the most complex regulated markets.

Project management software for real estate can help to centralize your workflow and keep all stakeholders on the same page. Real estate managers should be leveraging solutions that can support workflow management and operations. With the power of workflow automation, it has never been easier to streamline key processes as you embark on construction projects. We all know that the complexities of construction projects can often be overwhelming.

Manual incident management is an enormous challenge facing today’s enterprises. It wastes time and money, and often results in unhappy customers who have to deal with unreliable services because of persistent, unresolved issues. Manual ticket generation can take 20 to 30 minutes, and routing another 90—assuming the ticket is delivered to the right team.

Threat actors have been a constant, persistent, and ever-evolving part of doing business in a digital world. For the entire history of digital business, security teams have been trying to keep pace with the threats. On a good day, they might be able to get a few steps ahead. But it’s always a chase. And it only takes falling behind one time to lose big.

Here in North America it’s that spooky time of the year again, Halloween. As always, children look forward to this late-October holiday, the chance to dress up in costumes to go door-to-door and amass large hauls of candy treats, leaving their parents to deal with any later ‘tricks’ from associated sugar highs.

Technology teams have long sought to innovate more quickly to deliver better experiences to employees and customers. These teams often have to tab between hundreds of tools to make it happen, slowing progress and increasing risk, complexity, and cost. This complexity has the downstream effect of negatively impacting employee and customer experience due to manual processes, information silos, and disconnections.

This month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and at Ivanti we want you to be #BeCyberSmart. We’re focusing on this week’s theme of phishing. In this short video, James Saturnio, Senior Lead Technical Market Advisor at Ivanti, shows the power of Ivanti’s Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) multiple-layered anti-phishing protection to block 10 random phishing URLs from the OpenPhish feed.

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation across all industries, exacerbating Australia’s tech skills shortage. Research from RMIT Online identified a need for 156,000 new technology workers in Australia, with 87% of jobs now requiring digital skills. This skills gap is set to cost the economy $10 billion in lost growth by 2025 in technology, media, and communications alone.

Like zero trust security, being a cyber defender is a personal mindset. One can argue that it might be a form of paranoia, but being situationally aware while connected online is a nice behavioral attribute to have given today’s internet climate with the barrage of news regarding ransomware and data breaches.

We’re back with another episode of Ivanti Insights where I spoke with Chris Goettl, VP of Product Management. This week we talked about some of the news making the biggest headlines in cybersecurity. Topics included the recent critical flaw found in Apple devices, how hackers are using remote code execution to mine for cryptocurrency, and how the SolarWinds hackers may be making a comeback.

Over the past decade, the world has experienced remarkable changes and unprecedented challenges. Every year sees a sharp increase in natural disasters driven by a global rise in carbon emissions, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Mass protests have underscored the need for a more inclusive society and workplace. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of business continuity. As global citizens, we have the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it.

Around the world, more organizations are championing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives to help create a more sustainable, equitable, and ethical world, build stakeholder trust, and drive ESG impact and business value. There’s a good reason: ESG drives better business outcomes—and it makes the world better. For many, meeting ESG goals is a challenge. That’s because ESG spans a lot of different types of activities across the enterprise.

IT Transformation Is More Than Technology—Its People, Culture, and Policy If you think introducing a shiny new tool or service is transformation. Think again. Our changemakers wrought fundamental change in how people work, communicate and collaborate. In episode 2 of The Change Makers we investigate how changemakers plan their work; set up their vision, objectives, and roadmap. And we learn how IT transformation often begins with something other than technology.

There’s an incident. Your teams need to communicate with the development team that owns the service, but that team is too busy to stop and chat. Meanwhile, you in central IT have business leaders asking for updates, angry internal users calling the help desk, and customer service representatives asking for information. You have hundreds of tickets all pertaining to the incident in your ticketing system.

Government agencies had to adapt to a rapid increase in demand for services in 2020. They also had to adjust to a remote workforce. Many found themselves picking up the pace of their digital transformations and trying to modernize during a global health crisis. Perhaps above all else, many learned the importance of using the right digital tools, platforms, and services. They still have a long way to go.

As a modern enterprise your digital infrastructure – in all likelihood – is a multi-tiered, evolving, and expanding combination of services built on next-gen technologies. This dynamic configuration of servers, networks, applications, routers, etc. provides you with the agility to respond to rapidly changing customer demands. But it also tests the resilience of your digital infrastructure. Each microservice, each integration, each little update can snowball into a major outage.

Consulting project management software can transform your consultancy business. If you’re serious about scaling a consulting service that successfully meets the needs of clients, you should be actively leveraging consulting project management software like StartingPoint. Workflow automation has the potential to dramatically improve client experiences. To ensure client satisfaction and retention, you should be actively investing in tools and solutions that improve client experiences.

Like a football or soccer team, security also has two lineups that must be continuously managed. One lineup involves protecting the digital assets and data of a business. The other: managing the security risk and vulnerability exposure of these environments and endpoints. The tension between these two lineups keep security and IT very busy. There is a critical shortage of expert security professionals, which means no expanding the bench of talent, even if you can afford it.

Business disruption can happen any time, especially when you least expect it. That’s why it’s critical to have a business resilience plan in place. “We define organizational resilience as the ability to maintain performance in the face of environmental, political, social, cyber, and other disruptions,” explains ServiceNow Chief Financial Officer Gina Mastantuono in the Workflow Quarterly Fall 2021 issue.

Many, many years ago I briefly taught in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory (mainly marking scripts and samples, as well as extinguishing the occasional fire). I noticed that although students could achieve a reasonable grade by just following the text they were given and answering, “it turned blue” (or whatever), the really good students who got the best results took the time to understand how and why it turned blue.

The longer the pandemic stretches on, the more convinced I become that innovation is the key to recovery. And I’m not alone. McKinsey research found more than 90% of executives “expect the fallout from COVID-19 to fundamentally change the way they do business over the next five years.” Yet, many organizations are focusing less on innovation in an effort to minimize risk, save money, pursue safe opportunities, and bolster their core business, McKinsey reports.

The new normal has brought in new opportunities and new challenges. Technology plays an integral role in keeping your employees engaged in this new normal. It’s not enough to have any old technology but the right technology that drives engagement and helps your employees succeed in this digital workplace. Engaged teams are 17% more productive, show 24% to 59% less turnover and 21% greater profitability than the disengaged teams.

Microsoft Windows 11 is now available. In the coming weeks and months, PC vendors will offer an option to purchase a new computer with Windows 10 or Windows 11. Ivanti UEM solutions provide immediate support of Windows 11, allowing IT to discover, manage, secure and service these devices. Regardless of rolling out Windows 11 day-one or taking your time, Ivanti UEM is ready when you are.

The biggest business story of last year was how suddenly and completely the COVID-19 pandemic changed the ways we work and live. Organizations had to look at how they operate, adjust to a hybrid workforce, and further embrace digital transformation. ServiceNow has been at the forefront of the employee experience awakening. As new challenges emerge, our platform is perfectly suited to respond quickly to market-shifting events so that your workforce can stay productive.

Here at Ivanti, we are excited about Android 12. I’m pleased to share that we offer day-zero compatibility and key feature support across the Ivanti product portfolio for the new features built into Google’s updated OSs. Android 12 brings plenty of new things to see and experience with a combination of security and privacy.

When I started as a data engineer almost 20 years ago, I designed, developed, and implemented a worldwide sales reporting system for my employer using an enterprise data warehouse. Using analytical packages, my team drove quantifiable sales by transforming the way our company leveraged data. Even at the start of the millennium, it seemed obvious that studying analytics was a game-changer.

The service-level agreement (SLA) is a key component to any master service agreement (MSA) for any MSP looking to set clear guidelines with their customers on the services offering. Most of the MSAs I have reviewed outline exactly what the MSP is contractually obligated to provide the customer or business. The SLA is part of the contract where both the provider (you) and customer (them) agree on the IT services delivery model.

Business process automation could be a game-changer for the efficiency of your organization’s workflow. A recent report found that 43% of organizations say that they plan to reduce their workforce due to technology integration. More than 80% of organizational leaders report that they are speeding up work process automation and expanding their use of remote work.

Managing inventory is not as simple as it seems, especially when you have a huge office, multiple facilities, or multiple branches to control. Inventory management includes lots of factors that impact business and inventory is crucial for business and it can be a major part of your business, or it can be MRO (Maintenance repair operation).

Cybersecurity Awareness Month, now in its 18th year, is an opportunity to highlight the continually escalating conflict that is, for the most part, hidden from the public – unless it becomes media-worthy. Every day, those who are responsible for security (IT staff, threat and security analysts to CISOs) face new challenges. Digital transformation has accelerated at hyperspeed because organizations are focused on adjusting to COVID-19 disruptions.

Productivity is defined by measuring the amount of output over a given time frame. However, this discounts the quality of output, which is crucial in moving toward a more complete definition of productivity. Relating to services, increases in productivity generally highlight the amount of feature releases over time. This leaves out the critical measurement of quality compared to quantity. This is where a Service Catalog can greatly enhance true productivity within an engineering organization.