4 Hidden Gaps in IT: The Cost of Limited Visibility

Jay Srinivasan

Corporate IT’s Visibility Problem

We started Stitchflow to solve a specific issue - IT teams have a massive visibility problem.

Modern IT environments are riddled with gaps and inefficiencies. People have access to tools, groups and channels they shouldn't. Or people who should have access don't. There are compliance and device security gaps. Or your MDM and AV solutions are telling you different things about the same devices and you don’t know what to believe. And scores of unused licenses. This leads to employee experience, security and cost gaps.

To give some color, here are a few specific examples that we’ve seen recently:

  • An organization was paying for 100s of licenses assigned to suspended users in Okta who were no longer with the company.  . They thought these licenses would be removed during their offboarding workflow, but since these licenses were assigned through membership in an Okta group which were not part of the workflow, they were missed.

  • Another organization with heavy use of contractors found dozens of instances where  contractors had access to systems with customer  PII even though they did not go through company mandatory security training

  • In a third organization, all sales people hired between January and April 2023 missed new leads from website sign-ups because they were not part of a specific mailing list in Google

The common thread between all of these incidents is that they were caused by a lack of visibility—the IT team didn’t even realize that the gaps existed.

At Stitchflow, we’ve seen consistent themes in the gaps caused by lack of IT visibility. In this article, we lay out the different categories of gaps, their prevalence as well as impact on organizations.

The Root Cause: Complex IT environments

Before getting into the gaps, let’s quickly re-iterate the root cause behind the lack of visibility: fragmented tools and complex configurations in each tool.

Modern IT teams  have to manage 10s to 100s of tools including Core IT tools such as Okta, JAMF, Active Directory, company-wide tools such as Slack, Zoom and Office365, and function specific SaaS tools like Salesforce, Asana, and Airtable. And core tools in particular have complex configurations -  intricate webs of employees, contractors, apps, groups, and channels.

This results in a mesh that’s incredibly hard to decipher without significant manual effort in spreadsheets. And hence, gaps abound.

The 4 types of visibility gaps in IT environments

4-types-of-visibility-gaps-in-IT

Manually identifying and remediating these gaps

Without tools like Stitchflow, organizations have to find and address these gaps through manual grunt work. Spreadsheets from multiple tools, VLOOKUP and filters, and  manual error checking, followed by cumbersome remediation of each individual gap.

IT teams spend 10-20% of their weekly work in data analysis and manual remediation, and this doesn’t include extra weeks spent during audit season. And painfully, manual efforts required disproportionately increase with scale and complexity of an organization.

Stitchflow completely eliminates these gaps

Stitchflow completely eliminates the manual work involved and addresses all of the gaps in IT environments due to a lack of visibility. The platform connects every IT tool into a single pane of glass giving IT teams 360 visibility across their entire environment.

Stitchflow automatically applies over 100 checks across user access, drift in enrollment between groups, apps and channels, device health, compliance checks, and unused apps. Stitchflow identifies exactly what needs to be fixed, enables remediation in bulk, and then automates maintenance so gaps are addressed as soon as they are found.

20+ IT teams from incredible companies have been using Stitchflow since May and are seeing daily value - hours saved every week in spreadsheets, quick identification of gaps in their environments, and the ability to rectify painful issues in bulk.

Stitchflow’s free trial is commitment-light, requiring no set-up; All you have to do is authenticate into your tools and Stitchflow generates a gap analysis. You can instantly address issues and have confidence in the continuous correctness of your IT environment going forward. You can get a demo or try out Stitchflow by signing up below!