Rentokil Integrates Lansweeper with ServiceNow for Full Visibility and Better Security
About Rentokil-Initial
Based in the U.K., Rentokil Initial is one of the largest business services companies in the world, with 44,500 employees and operating in over 80 countries. The Company offers route-based services including Pest Control, Hygiene, and Workwear, through teams of local experts.
In early 2020, Rentokil Initial’s Global Configuration Manager was looking for a way to solve the gap in their asset management strategy. The Rentokil Initial team uses ServiceNow to manage digital workflows for enterprise operations, and they’d also been using its IT asset management capabilities to track and manage IT assets across the enterprise.
The company needed a solution that could automatically identify and add assets to the inventory that might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten. With more than 25,000 assets to manage, this was a critical capability to have, and after doing some market research discovered, Lansweeper was the perfect solution.
Goals
- Identify all IT assets and potential vulnerabilities in Windows devices and software across the global IT estate
- Feed up-to-date, accurate IT asset inventory data to ServiceNow CMDB for compliance tracking and reporting
- Validate security compliance across more than 25,000 IT assets globally
Results
- Successfully integrated Lansweeper with ServiceNow for complete visibility and security compliance reporting across all Windows assets.
- Accurate data discovered by Lansweeper being fed into CMDB to create a single verified data record for each managed asset
- Rolled out Lansweeper solution globally, strengthening the company’s security posture up
“Lansweeper is our independent eyewitness – providing critical visibility and helping us validate the health and security posture of our IT estate.”
Security and Visibility Were Key Drivers for Lansweeper Adoption
Ensuring security was the main driver for rolling out an IT asset discovery solution like Lansweeper across the organization. Eliminating spreadsheets and manual processes were also important goals.
Another critical requirement was the ability to integrate with the team’s existing asset and configuration management solution, ServiceNow. “We needed a solution that would complement what we already had in place and simplify software audits Mark Blackman – Global Configuration Manager. “While our ServiceNow platform provides asset and configuration management, if somebody didn’t manually register an asset, or if there were connected Windows devices that had not been identified, we were blind to those asset’s existence.
“It’s critical to understand the risks to your business from a security perspective, for example, identifying and alerting when an unknown asset connects to your network,”
“This helps us ensure our organization is secure and not vulnerable to an attack.” The mandate for GDPR compliance was also a driving factor for adopting an IT asset discovery solution.
Although Rentokil Initial evaluated other solutions, none was as easy to set up or as effective as Lansweeper. “We selected Lansweeper because of its ability to sniff out networks and identify devices that hadn’t been manually added as assets or hadn’t been registered in other tools,” he said. “The fact that Lansweeper was the most cost-effective solution was also compelling,” said Mark Blackman, Global Configuration Manager
A Federated Approach to Asset Management
Rentokil Initial has adopted a federated approach to populating their CMDB within ServiceNow, and Lansweeper serves as the phase-one discovery tool which feeds its data.
“Rather than relying on a single tool, we have multiple tools in place, including Lansweeper, which feed information to the CMDB within ServiceNow,”
“Having data from many tools creates data “triangulation,” providing a depth and breadth of information across all virtual machines, physical devices and software on the assets we want to manage.”
Integrating Lansweeper with ServiceNow involved preparing a report using Lansweeper’s basic reporting functionality, then using the SQL code in the Edit function to configure ServiceNow to query Lansweeper and pull in the data from the console using ServiceNow’s transform maps. In this way, all the data collected by Lansweeper is added to ServiceNow’s CMDB.
A Fast and Seamless Global Rollout Provides Organization-wide Visibility
Rentokil Initial has deployed multiple Lansweeper scanners across its regional data centers: two in each of its data centers in North America, Asia, and EMEA. All the data is funneled into a single database in the U.K.
Although ServiceNow runs in the cloud, an on-premises “mid server” performs the Lansweeper queries, and results are pushed back to the cloud instance of ServiceNow.
With this integration, Rentokil Initial has visibility into all assets connected to the corporate network, which helps them understand the state of IT globally, as well as the potential vulnerabilities and risks its business may be exposed to.
The global rollout took nine months from end to end and involved the networking team identifying all the subnets and credentials, and the infrastructure team verifying those credentials so the initial scan would be successful. Next, the team distributed Lansweeper LsAgents using their corporate software distribution tool. After testing the agents on five machines, they rolled out the solution country by country, until all markets had Lansweeper deployed.
Today roughly 50 people across Rentokil’s IT organization have access to the Lansweeper console, this is a service managed centrally by an administration team who have full administrative rights. Users can request access to the Lansweeper console with a custom request item in Rentokil Initial Self Service Portal.
“Lansweeper helps us identify a significant security gap by alerting when an unknown asset connects to your network.”
One Solution – Multiple Use Cases
The combination of Lansweeper’s agent-based and agentless scanning capabilities is ideal for managing devices across global locations.
Lansweeper’s agentless scanning provides unprecedented insight, enabling the ability to determine whether a lost or misplaced device is GDPR compliant and/or free from vulnerabilities, and therefore not at risk of being compromised.
A key use case for Lansweeper is for mergers and acquisition integration, a key part of Rentokil’s Initial strategy. “When we acquire a new company, we simply deploy Lansweeper on the company’s infrastructure, and we can immediately see all the devices they have, what operating systems are not supported, and whether they’ve been patched properly,” said Mark Blackman. “That helps us budget appropriately for any hardware upgrades or remediation work to bring these assets up to our corporate standards.”
The data in the CMDB keeps Rentokil Initial’s senior management team informed via KPI reports generated by the ServiceNow platform, and data from Lansweeper is essential to creating those reports.
A Watchful Eye Over IT Assets On-Premises and in the Cloud
Over the coming months, Rentokil Initial plans to leverage Lansweeper as they migrate to a new antivirus tool.
“This helps us to plan the program and assess our installed software status, and we’ll be looking at extending Lansweeper to scan not only Windows machines but our Linux machines, as well,” said Mark Blackman.
Moving forward, the cloud will also be a key focus for Rentokil Initial.
“We are looking at adopting Lansweeper in the cloud and being able to scan and inventory data from the cloud platforms that support our business,”
One thing’s for certain – with Lansweeper, Rentokil Initial has critical visibility and is helping to validate the health and security of our IT estate around the world.
