I recently had the privilege of spending the day with Steve Lodin, Vice President, Cybersecurity Operations and IAM at Sallie Mae. Beyond being a seasoned cybersecurity executive with Sallie Mae, Steve is a security industry thought leader and longtime friend.
I traveled to the Sallie Mae offices in Indianapolis to meet Steve and brought my video crew to record our asset intelligence conversations which you can watch above. Steve brings a wealth of leadership and hands-on security experience to any conversation, and when it comes to asset intelligence, he doesn’t disappoint.
Our conversations revolved around the need for asset intelligence for a large financial services organization like Sallie Mae. Steve shared several use cases for leveraging the Sevco Asset Intelligence Platform across security, IT Operations, and GRC. He also outlines how solid asset intelligence helps organizations save time, increase ROI, and prioritize operational tasks.
Steve views the Sevco Asset Intelligence Platform as a source of truth or an asset manager of managers at its foundational level. Across physical devices, cloud assets, identities, and software, Sevco discovers, correlates, and deduplicates vast amounts of asset intelligence with an agent-less, cloud-native architecture that is API-based and highly scalable while being easy to deploy and extract value from. I’ll underline that extracting value is an important part here: in modern, dynamic IT environments, Sevco doesn’t simply provide more data to sift through, but instead makes it easier to understand the existing data you have by pulling it into one place and providing better context.
Steve shares his perspectives on legacy approaches to managing asset intelligence. In short, they don’t scale or deliver the technical or business value organizations should demand. In some cases, organizations are still tracking assets with spreadsheets. Spreadsheets never worked well for this task decades ago, and they certainly don’t work in today’s rapidly changing, hybrid environments.
Steve mentions how security and non-security teams glean value from Sevco, especially through its bi-directional integration with other enterprise solutions such as CMDBs. Large-scale enterprise solutions, including CMDBs, SIEMs, SOARs, and ticketing systems, depend on accurate, complete, and timely information. However, they rarely receive this, which reduces the ROI of those solutions and hinders their ability to mitigate risk effectively. Asset intelligence is foundational to IT Operations, Security, and GRC, as Steve explains.