How Cyera automates ~89% of employee requests with Harmony - and replaced Jira in two days

The challenge: an IT team that grew by one for every 300 employees

When Kenny Vargas joined Cyera as IT Manager, the fundamentals were in place but “needed maturing - lots of maturing.” The MDM had to be replaced immediately. And the company was scaling at a pace few IT teams ever see: 20–40 new hires every single week, while the US IT team was, for a stretch, just two people.

Support ran through Slack - deliberately, because that’s where employees already lived - and the team prided itself on making people feel heard. But volume outran headcount. Average time to a real answer (not “hey, I’m here, one second”) hovered around 25–30 minutes, and requests would sit simply because there were too many to get to.

The most common ticket, by far: access requests. As a security company, Cyera intentionally gates and license-limits many of its hundreds of tools - so every wave of new hires generated a wave of requests that only IT could action.

DIY automation didn’t scale

The team first went the traditional route: Okta Workflows, Workato, and automations wired into Jira, their ITSM - they even hired a dedicated Jira admin to trigger actions off ticket creation. Each moderate-to-complex workflow took hours to build, required knowing exactly which API endpoints to call, and broke silently when the one person who built it wasn’t around. Jira’s built-in AI agent demanded a hand-curated library of “skills” describing what to do in every situation.

The search: “We weren’t even looking for an ITSM”

Cyera started out shopping for something much smaller: a chatbot that could answer the questions already covered by the knowledge base nobody read. Two requirements shaped the evaluation:

• A flawless end-user experience. It had to live in Slack, feel like talking to IT - not to a bot - and escalate seamlessly to a human when needed. Competing tools acted as an assistant for IT that agents relayed answers from; Cyera wanted the AI answering employees directly, in the same thread where IT could step in.
• No skill library to babysit. The platform had to be plug-and-play: read the documentation, do as much as it can, and escalate what it can’t - with nothing for a two-person team to hand-maintain.

Harmony checked both boxes - and added something Cyera didn’t expect: a full agentic ITSM, where every application, MacBook, and Windows device is visible and actionable in one place.

The rollout: prioritize by ticket data, connect the context, go

Working with the Harmony team, Cyera exported a full year of historical tickets and let the data pick the use cases: anything with over 1,000 requests a year - access requests and password resets at the top - became the priority list. Those were live within the first two months.

The deployment philosophy was simple: AI is only as good as its context. Cyera connected the systems that already knew its users and devices - Okta, Jamf, Intune, HiBob - and let Harmony act through them, rather than rebuilding that knowledge by hand in workflow definitions.

Harmony set expectations upfront - and then hit them:

Replacing Jira took two days

Once the value was proven, the last dependency to go was Jira itself - onboarding and offboarding tickets were still flowing through it because legacy automations lived there. The actual migration was about two days of work: catalog the automations, disconnect them, and reproduce them in Harmony. The HiBob integration that used to create Jira tickets now connects directly - no field mapping, because Harmony already has the context to route each request to the right desk. Today, everything lives in Harmony, 100%.

The results

~85–89% of employee interactions resolved automatically

Against an internal target of 70%, Harmony autonomously resolves roughly 85–89% of everything coming into the service desk - with access control making up the bulk. Once Cyera built approval policies defining who can approve each application, that entire category left IT’s plate.

Access management: 90–95% automated, approved from a phone

New tools enter Cyera with SSO and SCIM by default and tie into Okta. Harmony controls access through scoped groups, so an access request needs exactly one human action: an approval tap - from anywhere.

25–30 minutes back per person, every day - reinvested in FedRAMP

With the low-hanging fruit - knowledge-base questions, app grants, password resets - handled autonomously, each IT team member gets at least 25–30 minutes back a day. For Kenny, the impact is strategic: instead of working the ticket queue to control overflow, he can focus on Cyera’s ten-month push toward FedRAMP High compliance, while Harmony-generated documentation lets the team resolve the bigger issues without him.

CSAT that never leaves the fives

Employee satisfaction is measured inside the platform across both AI and human responses - one location, one score. It’s consistently 5 out of 5. “It doesn’t go below that, ever. As long as people are happy, that’s what matters.”

One pane of glass for hundreds of tools - and every device

Cyera runs hundreds of applications across productivity, security, and IT. All of them are visible in Harmony, alongside every MacBook and Windows device - actionable without logging into another SaaS. Laptop password resets that once meant signing into the MDM through multiple security layers to fish out a recovery key are now a button in Harmony, or simply: “go ask Harmony.”

Beyond IT: nine desks and zero-touch offboarding

What started as an IT chatbot is now the middleman for the whole company. Cyera runs nine desks on Harmony - including HR, RevOps, office operations, onboarding/offboarding, alerts, and an AI Lab - and requests route themselves: an HR question routes to HR, a Salesforce license request routes to the RevOps desk even if it was asked in the IT Slack channel. “At this point, we don’t interact with that team almost ever now.”

Using Harmony’s AI Builder, one IT team member built a fully automated offboarding workflow: HR submits a request, a second person approves it (a deliberate human-in-the-loop guardrail - requester and approver can never be the same person), and Harmony actions Google Workspace, Okta, and the MDM on its own. IT’s role is reduced to confirming it all worked. Permissions are scoped deliberately - read-only in some tools, create-only in others - with a path toward fuller autonomy as trust grows.

Kenny’s advice to IT leaders

• Take it slow and match the tool to your use case. “Ensure that what you’re trying to do meets the solution, and the solution gets the job done.”
• Let your ticket history choose your first use cases. Anything with 1,000+ requests a year is your priority list.
• Context first. Connect the IdP, MDM, and HRIS before expecting agentic magic - without context, you’re back to hand-building keyword workflows.
• Don’t build it yourself. “You can - but someone has to maintain that. At a company that’s nonstop growing, there’s no time for outages.”

That’s IT.