GAA case studies
GAA · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The GIAC Global Asset Administrator (GAA) credential is designed for IT professionals who manage the discovery, lifecycle, compliance, and financial control of hardware, software, cloud, and virtual assets. It suits asset managers, configuration managers, procurement and licensing analysts, and IT operations staff who need to demonstrate a vendor-neutral understanding of asset management governance and practice. The GAA case studies are 5 cases and about 4,180 words.
1Reconciling Discovery Observations Against a CMDB Before Audit
Northbridge Health runs 14 hospitals and a central IT shared service. Its discovery tool performs authenticated scans weekly and unauthenticated network sweeps daily, dropping results into a staging database.
816 words, about 4 min2SQL Server True-Up on a Virtualised Cluster
Meridian Freight runs SQL Server 2019 Enterprise on a VMware vSphere cluster of four hosts, each with 2 sockets x 16 cores, so 32 cores per host. vMotion and DRS are fully enabled and HA admission control reserves 25% of capacity.
851 words, about 4 min3Tagging Enforcement and Attribution in a Fast-Growing Cloud Estate
Halcyon Retail grew from 300 to 3,800 cloud resources in 18 months across three AWS accounts and two Azure subscriptions. Policy requires CostCenter, Owner, Environment and Application on every resource; 41% lack at least one of them.
801 words, about 4 min4End-User Refresh Business Case with an Unreliable Register
Corvus Insurance Services has 2,400 end-user laptops. Of these, 1,050 are 5.5 years old and run Windows 10, and 780 of those fail Windows 11 hardware checks: no TPM 2.0, or an unsupported processor.
883 words, about 4 min5ITAD Evidence Failure After Office Closure
Arclight Legal LLP is decommissioning 640 end-user devices and 46 servers from a closed office. A regional IT asset disposal vendor collected them under a master services agreement that references "certified data destruction" but names no standard, no certificate format, no notification obligation and no audit right.
829 words, about 4 min