Syntric Pty Ltd reduces manual labour with runZero, saving 20+ hours per week

Problem

Syntric Pty Ltd is a leading provider of property technology (PropTech) services focused on building automation operational technology (OT) for the commercial, retail, high-end residential, and industrial sectors. Operating under four core tennants; reducing risk, lowering costs, improving sustainability, and improving building occupant experience, Syntric’s ultimate goal is to become the best MSP possible for OT environments.

At Syntric, success is measured by customer satisfaction. This focus was put to the test when their customers started to express interest in understanding the assets they had in their environments to more proactively manage their asset life cycles. Syntric knew they needed to find an outside solution to support this request because their existing approach to asset management of using manual scanning with freely-available tools were fine for one-offs, but it would not scale, as it required a lot of tinkering. Syntric quickly realised that gaining this insight would be invaluable to them to be able to flag aged equipment (e.g. system headends, Programmable Logic Controllers, IIoT, etc.) ahead of time to their customers, thus providing their customers with the ability to plan ahead and save money in the long run. All in all, bringing in a comprehensive cyber asset discovery, inventory, and remediation solution would be a win-win for both Syntric and their customers.

Solution

Before jumping into the solution scoping process, Syntric first took the time to speak directly to their customers about what they were doing currently for cyber asset discovery, cyber asset inventory, and cyber asset hygiene. They wanted to understand what their customers’ pain points were so they could find and in turn offer the right solution to their customers to alleviate their challenges. “Some of our customers looked at other discovery tools, which were quadruple the price, if not more, than runZero, not to mention extremely complex and difficult to use,” mentioned Cameron Exley, Head of Technology Commercialisation at Syntric.

The team at Syntric came across runZero by happenstance. “We were lucky that we stumbled across runZero. We started using it as an internal troubleshooting tool and instantly saw the value in the data. We’ve fallen in love with runZero and wouldn’t have a reason to change it. It works, it’s easy, we don’t have to worry about it in regards to maintenance,” explained Exley. Their positive experience and realisation of an opportunity to better serve their customers eventually led to Syntric becoming a runZero partner. “Our customers didn’t realise it was possible to have a repository of information that goes and scans networks automatically. This translated into us becoming a runZero partner, because we’ve seen the ability for us to upsell and talk about strategic asset management at a much more granular level than what they’re used to,” said Exley. To their surprise, becoming a partner has provided additional, unforeseen business benefits. “It immediately opened the door to a customer we would have struggled to get in front of because they needed something that was a differentiator,” described Exley.

Syntric has benefited from runZero’s unique ability to successfully navigate through their customers’ complex OT environments. “runZero has enabled us to support our customers in keeping track of their environments, how they’re working, and getting them back on board when they lose track,” said Exley. runZero also provides detailed insight into the assets on Syntric’s customers’ networks, including uncommon data that other solutions don’t pick up. “A customer may not know how to log into the equipment. They need certain bits of information to get there, but they’re not capable of collecting this information themselves and it’s impossible to be skilled in every unique control platform. runZero shortcuts a lot of the discovery work, providing us with an image of the network and picking up many of the extremely uncommon ports we find in OT environments, even those that have been changed from the default. runZero figures them out and picks up automatically,” Exley explained.

This in-depth understanding of the assets on their customers’ networks has enabled Syntric to provide their customers with actionable insights to empower them to be more proactive in their cyber asset hygiene and overall cyber security. “runZero has helped us comb through customer environments and pick up the lurking issues. We start looking and find, ‘Okay, we’ve got a bridge over here. We’ve got terrible topology. Half this network comes and goes depending on what time of day we scan it.’ Those insights really help us as the people coming in to try and fix up the network,” detailed Exley. He went on to add how these insights help inform their customers to make improvements to their cyber asset hygiene, “Our customers will explain, ‘I know what’s on my network now. I thought I needed to invest a whole lot more money in this asset. But actually, this other asset is obviously screaming higher priority because we can see it’s still running a critical system like Windows XP (for example). I actually need to change my investment strategy.’”