Woodside Homes established control by presenting professional-looking reports to external auditors

Woodside Homes case study
Customer
A home building company from the USA with offices across four states.
Challenge
Providing efficient reports to auditors and prevent security incidents in their Microsoft 365 environment.
Solution
Comprehensive auditing and alerting options in Syskit Point.
Results
Presenting professional-looking audit reports to their external auditors and establishing control over their environment.

Customer

Woodside Homes is a home building company from the USA with offices across four states. They’ve been building innovative, sustainable homes since 1977 under the motto Better By Design”, which ensures everything from carefully selected land to simplifying the home-buying process.

Richard Leaf, Woodside Homes

Native capabilities within the SharePoint admin center give you only a portion of what you need to provide to auditors, and that portion is not user-friendly.

Richard Leaf, Director of Applications, Woodside Homes

Challenge

For the home-building company, the biggest pain point was the lack of out-of-the-box Microsoft 365 auditing functionality, as well as wasting money on underutilized licenses.

Woodside Homes Case Study


Inadequate auditing reports that cause security incidents

Richard Leaf is a Director of Applications, in charge of the ERP system, Office 365, SharePoint, Azure, and software licensing. He’s been working for the company for 24 years.

Woodside Homes were acquired by a Japanese company, Sekisui House, four years ago. As a publicly-traded company, it is subject to auditing requirements for J-SOX compliance. It’s the set of Japanese standards for the evaluation and auditing of internal controls over financial reporting. Accordingly, the biggest pain point Richard met was the lack of out-of-the-box Microsoft 365 auditing functionality. Whenever a security incident happened, they would need to provide audit evidence.

However, native capabilities within the SharePoint Online admin center give only a portion of what he needed to provide, and that portion was not user-friendly. He would have to go into the Microsoft 365 console and take screenshots of activity logs on their tenant. He couldn’t just make a report, which was very inefficient for them and their auditors. Richard wanted to avoid negative opinions from the auditors about the level of control they have.

Leaving money on the table with underutilized licenses

Richard also had trouble quantifying how much money would be spent on licenses and projecting the numbers to company management. With the native feature setup, he couldn’t drill down into details of the licenses, their usage, and their activity.

Richard tried to find help with a third-party tool that turned out to be cumbersome to implement. The support was poor, and after spending six months trying to get it working, they couldn’t set up the product. Moreover, it was designed for on-prem, while Woodside Homes had already migrated to the cloud.


Solution

Richard wanted to try another tool for auditing to keep peace of mind. Syskit was recommended to him by an Office 365 consultant a year ago. He showcased audit features to their management and got approval to buy Syskit Point.

“It’s exceptionally easy to implement the trial and roll out the tool! I never used a tool that was that smooth to upgrade.”

Syskit Point’s comprehensive auditing and alerting options

With the audit capabilities in Point, Richard can schedule regular reports to his auditors or give them direct access to it via the Point interface. They could also see in simple XLSX format who did what, where, and when – whether it is a change in permissions, configuration, or content.

Richard also uses license reporting and management features to detect inactive licenses and maximize software license usage. With Point, Richard can view exactly how many inactive licenses there are in which departments and their cost.

On top of that, he uses Syskit Point alerts as proactive control over his environment. He has set up alerts to arrive in his inbox, and he’s planning to set up the alerts for team managers as
well to have more control over their content. Point alerts help him stay on top of unauthorized permissions changes, guest user activity, and suspicious logins.

Richard and his team were delighted with how easy it was to install and upgrade the product along the way. He was also satisfied with the healthy number of enhancements and those on the roadmap. He intends to introduce it to the site and team owners for access reviews and recertifications.

Results

With Syskit Point running in the background, Woodside Homes established control by presenting professional-looking reports to external auditors.


Resulting in:

  • 1.
    Saving time and gaining control

    With Point’s audit options, Richard not only saved time manually printing audit logs from screenshots, but also built up a strong image of having control over his environment by providing professional-looking reports to auditors.

  • 2.
    Staying ahead of security issues

    Using Point’s alerts, Richard could proactively control his environment and prevent security incidents from happening. That saved his company an external audit and security investigation resources.

  • 3.
    Maximizing license utilization

    Without Point, they would struggle with managing licenses and knowing what’s going on in their environment. Using Point, they optimized 35% of all company licenses.

With SysKit Point, you can say we have 35% of inactive licenses costing us this much per year, and it’s easy to identify them and resolve this situation.

Richard Leaf, Director of Applications, Woodside Homes