Napoleon Games Integrates Lansweeper With 4me for an Always Accurate CMDB
About Napoleon Games
Napoleon Games is a Belgian online entertainment and sports betting company leading the Belgian market in online entertainment, casino games, and sports betting. They also own the Grand Casino in Knokke, as well as 25 arcades spread across Belgium. Since 2021 they are a part of the pan-European sports betting and gaming operator Superbet.
Results
- Successfully integrated Lansweeper with 4me for complete visibility and security compliance reporting across the entire IT environment.
- Feed always accurate and up-to-date IT asset inventory data to the 4me CMDB to achieve service desk excellence.
- Supported ISO Certification through automated IT asset management and improved reporting.
- Regulated Software licensing to battle shadow IT.
“While working towards IT Asset Management in general, we had several different agents already running as patch and inventory software. But for tools that could offer everything we were looking for at an affordable price, Lansweeper immediately caught our attention”
Four years ago, the IT team at Napoleon Games found themselves on the lookout for a dedicated ITSM tool. An assessment of their IT processes led by Orange Cyber Defense had shown that while they had a good handle on their environment of 2000 assets and 600 users, their service management was lacking.
Since Napoleon Games relies on a large team of developers to support their operations, they already had a number of tools in place, which were also being used by the IT team as a ticketing system. However, the licensing for these was limited, which often put them in conflict with other business teams who also relied on the same tooling. A need for a dedicated ITSM tool became evident.
The team from Orange Cyber Defense would end up introducing them to 2Grips, a trusted partner for customer satisfaction, enterprise service management, and service improvement initiatives with whom they had had positive collaborations surrounding their integration with 4me as a Service Management Platform.
Centralizing ITSM and ESM With 4me
4me is a complete service management platform that combines ITSM, ESM, and SIAM features, to create an environment where all internal departments can work seamlessly together. They have a flexible pricing plan that allows you to only pay for the things you use, when you use them.
Wanting to weigh their options, the team at Napoleon Games also tested several other ITSM platforms. However, the arguments and knowledge presented by 2Grips convinced them to choose 4me for its scalability, adaptability, integration options, affordability, and the possibility to start small. Napoleon Games has now been using 4me for four years with 2Grips’ no-worries support and a yearly, pre-paid user subscription. While they started using 4me as an ITSM tool, they are also exploring its capabilities as an ESM tool, and the finance, compliance, and HR departments have been using it as well.
Moving Toward CMDB Excellence With Lansweeper for Configuration Management
With 4me firmly in place at Napoleon Games as their ITSM tool, a new challenge presented itself. While they had the necessary tool to service their IT environment, keeping the CMDB up to date and complete was still a largely manual process. Additional tools were added for asset management, agents were installed on various machines, and software was added for patching and inventory. However, none of these quite provided the depth of information they were looking for, resulting in tools stacking up again, while they had implemented 4me with the end goal of centralizing everything.
Lansweeper was an easy choice to solve this problem. Thanks to its unrivaled agentless scanning capabilities and credential-free device recognition, Lansweeper does not only provide the team with a complete inventory of hardware and software assets, but it also discovers any shadow IT and integrates directly with 4me.
The main benefit of having a complete and always up-to-date CMDB is to support the IT team in their daily tasks. Linking devices, software and users makes following up on tickets and requests infinitely easier. Instead of retrieving information from several different teams, they now have all information in 4me, with a link to Lansweeper to retrieve additional details.
The integration between Lansweeper and 4me allows the team at Napoleon Games to keep a complete and extensive CMDB that is reliable and easy to maintain. They are adding between 100 and 150 new CIs each week and they have only just started adding their Apple products as CIs
How Lansweeper Takes 4me CMDB to the Next Level
Through the integration set up by 2Grips, all hardware asset data collected in Lansweeper is automatically synced into 4me. Product categories are generated in 4me based on the asset types found in Lansweeper. For each asset in Lansweeper, 4me creates a product and CI and links it to the user. Every CI includes a link to the corresponding asset in Lansweeper, so additional asset information can be retrieved easily. Whenever a change is made to an asset in Lansweeper, the information in 4me is also automatically updated.
While software CIs still need to be added manually to 4me, they are automatically checked against all software assets in Lansweeper. Any software assets that are found in Lansweeper but not in 4me are added to an Excel sheet that is then emailed to a predetermined email address to check if any new CIs need to be added. CIs that have no corresponding asset in Lansweeper will automatically be deleted. The integration also links the existing software CIs to the correct hardware devices.
An Invaluable Tool in ISO Certification
Napoleon Games is also an ISO Certified company. Not only is a complete asset inventory part of many security frameworks, having all asset data in 1 place also makes it easier to retrieve information and generate reports for audits.
In the process of achieving ISO-9001 (Quality Management) and ISO-27001 (Information Security) certification, the IT team found themselves inundated with requests for reports from their CISO. These requests are much easier to fill now that an always up-to-date CMDB is available.
Having a reliable ITSM system in place also means that users no longer need admin rights on their own PCs. All software installations are now centrally managed or temporary admin rights can be granted to do a quick install. During those moments of temporary admin rights, the team can closely monitor what is happening on the machine to avoid abuse or to reverse changes made if necessary.
Improving Resource and License Management
For the IT team at Napoleon Games, saving time and money was never the main driver. They are a small, hands-on support team in a medium-sized business, with no heavy SLA demands. However, it is a nice side effect of their main goal of centralizing all data.
When you need to replace all notebooks of a certain model every year, you now have a complete list of all machines that need replacing at a click of a button. Soon 4me will be adding functionality to see how many incidents can be linked to a certain asset type, so you can avoid them in the future, saving yourself a lot of time and trouble. Having a full, up-to-date view of all your software assets means you can get rid of unused, duplicate, or simply unnecessary software installs, freeing up resources that can be better spent elsewhere.
Before, license management was a largely manual process that could never be fully accurate. There was always a risk of software being installed without the necessary license. Users would buy their own licenses for software they wanted and then pass it on to colleagues. Having the CIs automatically checked against the software Lansweeper discovers, puts a stop to the software sprawl. Sometimes, replacing a personal user license with an enterprise license will come at an extra cost, but at least now everything is under contract and approved by Legal and Finance, which is infinitely preferable to the risks posed by IT anarchy.
Looking Ahead to Network Topology
“The ultimate dream,” Jeroen says,” is a full view of the network topology so that if one service is giving trouble, we can just drop down to see everything and everyone else that may be impacted.” The dream may be closer than it seems. A limited network mapping feature is already available in 4me that links CIs and service levels. Plans are already in place to add network mapping to Lansweeper as well. Since the acquisition of Cloudockit in early 2022, Lansweeper has its hands on its network mapping technology which will over time be added to Lansweeper’s toolset.
“Those Cloudockit charts, those look really good. Really beautiful. Our Devops team is looking at it right now.” – Björn Laget, Application Process Owner
Learn more about the Lansweeper and 4me integration & Discover Cloudockit and our Integration Roadmap.
