A lot of attention gets paid in the press to “zero-day” threats — attacks that wreak havoc on organizations while they’re still completely unknown to the cybersecurity community. But the truth is that 60 percent of breaches are the result of known vulnerabilities that have been left unpatched.

The problem is that patching practices in many organizations are slow and disorganized. Too many teams are in charge of patching too many different systems, and security leaders typically lack visibility into who is staying on top of patching and who isn’t. The good news is that many organizations already have a powerful tool to help streamline vulnerability management — the service management platform ServiceNow. Although some organizations use the platform primarily to manage help desk tickets, it’s capable of much more. The solution can also help organizations shore up vulnerabilities across their IT environments.

Here’s how.

ServiceNow offers organizations a powerful platform, integrating the framework of the IT Infrastructure Library into a user-friendly tool with powerful management and reporting capabilities.

Organizations use ServiceNow to track incidents, share knowledge with users, manage assets and automate call centers. The breadth of features available within ServiceNow can be overwhelming to administrators, and the reality is that many organizations simply don’t have the resources available to optimize their use of this powerful platform.

But CDW’s SmartAdmin solution helps organizations leverage our team of experts to overcome the hurdles of managing the complex and ever-expanding ServiceNow platform.

ServiceNow recently announced four return-to-work applications focused on helping customers prepare and manage their employees for a safe return to the workplace. From employee readiness surveys to health screening to PPE inventory management and more, these apps and the complimentary management dashboard will help ensure that the workforce transition from home back to the office is seamless and safe.

In its bid to help organizations return to the workplace in a safe manner, ServiceNow is doing what it does best, helping companies manage the complex workflows that are integral part of keeping employees healthy. The ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite is engineered with that in mind.

For many organizations, the ServiceNow Service Portal is the primary way that approvers interact with the records they approve. It is also often a major way that managers, directors and VPs interact with the system when introducing ServiceNow’s functionality to other departments. First impressions matter; providing an optimal user experience right off the bat can go a long way toward long-term adoption within an organization. Here are a few things you may want to do to improve the Portal experience for your approvers.

On its own, the baseline data captured on the Service Portal can be useful. The Portal logs can be found under Service Portal > Log Entries, and some basic reporting can be found under Service Portal > Usage Overview. While the baseline functionality is powerful, with a little configuration you can capture and display more usable information. This blog post will share some suggestions for how to glean more value from the baseline data.

ServiceNow recently announced four crisis management applications it is making available, at no cost, to provide digital workflows for organizations struggling to meet the new challenges that COVID-19 is creating on a daily basis.

From coordinating emergency responses to tracking exposures among coworkers, to instant mobile distribution of critical updates, these apps can make the difference between being prepared to mitigate the risks of unexpected events or being broadsided by them.

Join our live Q&A webinar on April 9 to learn more about these apps and how CDW ServiceNow Solutions can help support them.