Agent Client Collector for Visibility Content use case
The Agent Client Collector for Visibility Content (ACC-VC) use case demonstrates how a financial organization can perform effective discovery across on-premise and remote environments.
Use case overview
A leading financial organization needed to overcome the limitations of traditional agentless discovery to ensure comprehensive visibility, compliance, and security across both on-premise and remote environments.
Challenges
- Limited visibility into restricted environments: The organization’s security policies prevented MID Servers from initiating connections to highly sensitive systems, such as core banking infrastructure and financial databases. This created visibility gaps in critical environments.
- Incomplete coverage of remote endpoints: With a rapidly expanding remote workforce, many devices operated outside the corporate network boundary, making them inaccessible to agentless discovery. This resulted in gaps in asset tracking and monitoring.
- Compliance and audit challenges: Strict regulatory requirements required granular, auditable, and continuously updated asset data. Agentless methods lacked the depth and consistency needed to meet these standards.
Solutions
To address these challenges, the financial organization implemented Agent Client Collector for Visibility Content (ACC-VC) as part of its ITOM strategy.
- Agent-based data collection for secure environments: Agents were deployed on restricted and high-security systems, enabling:
- Secure, outbound communication without violating firewall policies.
- Continuous monitoring without requiring inbound access.
- Remote endpoint visibility: Agents installed on employee devices provided continuous visibility, regardless of network location, and real-time data collection from off-network systems.
- Deep and continuous discovery: ACC-VC enabled:
- Rich system telemetry and configuration data collection.
- Continuous updates to the CMDB, improving data freshness and accuracy.
- Compliance and policy enforcement: Agents enforced and monitored endpoint level compliance by:
- Capturing detailed, auditable system data.
- Supporting compliance frameworks and audit requirements.
Outcomes
- End-to-end asset visibility: The organization achieved complete visibility across secure data center assets, cloud and hybrid environments, and remote workforce devices. This eliminated blind spots and improved operational decision making.
- Improved CMDB accuracy and reliability: Continuous data collection ensured up-to-date and trustworthy CI data, and improved service mapping and dependency insights.
- Enhanced compliance and audit readiness: The organization benefited from granular, auditable asset data, faster and more efficient compliance reporting, and reduced risk of regulatory violations.
- Increased operational efficiency: Reduced reliance of manual discovery and troubleshooting led to faster issue detection and lower operational overhead.
ACC-VC enabled the organization to transform its discovery strategy from periodic with limited visibility to continuous and intelligent, with comprehensive observability. This enabled the financial institution to:
- Secure critical systems
- Support a distributed workforce
- Maintain regulatory compliance
- Build a resilient and scalable IT operations framework