Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform vs. Azure DevOps

RSA Archer is fantastic at cataloguing, personalizing assessments, raw reporting, and capacity to add custom fields. It is a little clunky around adding contextual information to notifications, peeking into data before attempting to load pages, quick navigation or determining linked (or sub-linked) relationships. These are all concerns that can either be worked around with an appropriate data scheme or with careful administration of the sub-routines.

Incentivized

Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.

Incentivized

• Integration capabilities to multiple enterprise systems
• Control standards and Procedures to address multiple regulatory/authoritative sources, standards and frameworks enabling test once satisfy many requiremnts
• Rapid application development and User friendly tool with configuration capability to customize easily without user requiring programming or coding skills

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• They release time to time updates, which causes issues in the GUI. However, one has to be careful while installing the update.
• There is no open and free academy to learn more about the tool.
• One cannot stay to a particular product version, they have to move to the next version to keep up with the changes.

Incentivized

• I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
• The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

Good tool to get the information communicated, approval workflow, and easy to add new findings/questionnaires. Seems to be compatible with different browsers and little downtime. Only request for improvement is to add an export feature with fewer clicks. Maybe batch export.

Incentivized

It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).

Incentivized

Our RSA Archer team is dedicated to finding solutions for our organization. They haven't mentioned any issues with receiving support with deployment or bug fixes, and generally the platform is very dependable. They are always very excited about delivering a version upgrade and presenting any new features that provide more dashboards or chart types.

Incentivized

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

It has been roughly 5 years since I have seen Securevue, so a lot can change, but to me it felt like several products were purchased and an attempt was made to piece them all together into a single solution (and I believe that may have been true). It also required agents on endpoints which did not fit the model I believed customers were looking for. MetricStream appeared to be difficult to install as it took their own engineers some time to get it installed in my lab environment. I did not think their web interface was as intuitive as RSA Archer. Customization to the platform was possible to some degree, but required a lot more work and technical skills than required by Archer. I did like the landing page for MetricStream which called out the important action items for the current user, but Archer v6.X now has this feature.

Incentivized

Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.

Incentivized

• We were able to achieve approx 63% gain in operational efficiency.
• Reduce the number of findings and exceptions during an Internal audit to almost zero.
• Get compliance to all client contracts tracked through the tool thus increasing the confidence of clients in our systems and processes.

Incentivized

• We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
• We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
• We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.

Incentivized