Now that Vegas has mostly recovered from our visit during Kaseya Connect 2013, we’d like to share with you a little bit from one of this year’s best sessions: “Customer Perspectives on Leveraging the Power of 6.3.”
Industry Expert Viewpoint: SMART IT Project Planning for Success
This post was written by one of our Industry Experts, Erick Simpson, VP and CIO of SPC International.
The Project Management Process
One of the 3 Service Delivery areas a Solution Provider can become very profitable in; or tremendously unprofitable, is in Project Management.
If the Solution Provider’s Project Management processes are solid and delivered effectively, their project outcomes will have the best chance to meet their established criteria for success. If; however, the Provider’s Project Management processes are weak or non-existent, it will be very difficult to manage timelines, schedules and resources along with change and communications. This will effectively erode customer satisfaction, profitability and the opportunity for additional services.
As the person responsible for overall project success, the Project Manager participates in the Solution Provider’s professional service delivery process, and creates project plans that include activities, phases and timelines, and schedules and assigns resources to deliver all project-based services. In addition, the Project Manager manages every aspect of project delivery from the project kick-off meeting through provisioning, implementation, go-live and sign-off.
Project Planning
Once a prospect or customer has agreed to the Project Proposal and its Terms, the Project Manager can begin the process of planning for Project Implementation. Project Planning is the first component of Project Management, which is defined as the effective organization and management of resources to insure a Project’s completion within its defined scope, timeline and budget. Project Planning includes the following:
- Definition of the Project Scope
- Methods to be utilized during Project Implementation
- The Identification of all tasks to be completed during Project Implementation
- The creation of a timeline and expected duration for each task’s completion
- The estimation and allocation of resources for each task’s completion
- Managing Risk, Change and the Communications and Status Reporting processes
- Determining the criteria for success of each phase and the overall Project
- Incorporating Phase and overall Project Review
- Managing individual Phase and overall Project Acceptance
Project Objectives
The overall Project objectives that the Project Plan must insure are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
The evaluation of the Project’s success at meeting these objectives occurs at the Project closure; however, effective Project Management increases the potential for their attainment.
Once the Project Plan has been created, it is presented to the customer in order to:
- Receive approval of the overall Project Plan
- Verify the Project Schedule against the customer’s calendar
- Identify and allocate customer resources required for Project Implementation
- Agree to Roles, Responsibilities and Task Assignment between all parties
- Agree upon the Risk Management Plan
- Agree upon the Change Control process
- Agree upon the Communication and Status Reporting process
- Agree to the criteria for success of individual phases and the overall Project
- Agree to final Acceptance Criteria
In order to move to the implementation phase of the Project, it is important that the customer approve the overall Project Plan, which includes the Project Scope, the methods utilized during Project Implementation and the Project timeline and schedule. In addition, customer resources such as staff and vendors may be required as assets during Project Implementation, and their involvement must also be approved by the customer.
An effective Risk Management Plan will support Project Implementation as a contingency strategy should the need to roll back during any phase of the Project becomes necessary, and a Change Control process is required, should additional tasks or services outside of the agreed-upon Project Plan and Proposal need to be authorized by the customer to insure Project completion.
A solid communication and status reporting process must be agreed to by all parties in order to keep all affected resources including the customer apprised of Project status at all times and facilitate effective decision-making throughout the lifecycle of the Project.
Accountability to tasks and their timely completion can only be enforced once all resources have agreed to their roles and responsibilities, as well as to Project milestones and timelines.
Kaseya Industry Experts are some of the best and brightest professionals in their areas of expertise, ranging from IT Operations, to Service Provider Sales, Service Management Best Practices., and more.
image credit: gettyimages.com
With Centralized IT Systems Management, Your Network Won’t Run Amok
Anyone who has been to a schoolyard or daycare center knows the importance of managing and keeping track of children at all times.
That’s why rules to walk in a single file exist. Or hold hands while moving. Or sit in assigned seats. Otherwise, it’s a free-for-all. When moving from one place to another, one child might decide to hop, another would crawl, a few would race each other, and the rest would find some individual, creative ways to amplify the chaos.
And if you’ve seen a group of children running amok, you’ve seen chaos. You even might have felt a little envious of their carefree ways.
Chaos in an IT network, however, is nothing to envy. If machines are running under different rules in different places, or out of the sight of administrators, you’ve got problems. You may have problems you don’t even realize, which can surely translate to security risks and higher operational costs.
A well-managed network requires four essential steps – discovery, management, automation and validation. After you find and start tracking all your IT assets in the discovery phase, it’s important to follow that up with sound management. That means having uniform policies, ongoing monitoring and centralized control.
Efficient Management with Kaseya
Replicating processes and procedures for consistent, efficient management is next to impossible without some level of automation, especially as a network expands in multiple locations. Documentation typically is either spotty or non-existent, and manual processes take up a lot of time.
Kaseya changes all that, first by helping you discover assets you don’t even know exist, or forgot you have, and then by letting you remotely manage and monitor the whole network from a central location. What Kaseya does is akin to the difference between the cacophonous sound of an orchestra tuning up and the playing of a melodious symphony.
Order replaces chaos. Administrators gain control and flexibility. They know where network components are, and they can organize them as they see fit. For instance, an administrator might choose to manage groups of machines by type, OS or location – or by some other characteristic that makes sense in the context of the organization’s structure.
Centralized IT systems management control is key – through a dashboard that gives administrators visibility into the entire network. This makes management a straightforward, consistent process that removes manual tasks, guesswork and blind decisions. When a new security or management policy is needed, an administrator can set up the policy from the central dashboard and disseminate it to distributed machines. From the same dashboard, the administrator can monitor compliance and issue updates when necessary.
In addition, Kaseya makes it possible to manage machines when they are on the road and not connected to the network, a feature that is especially critical in the age of mobility. And this means that even when users are traveling, you can instill the kind of order in your network that a good teacher applies in a classroom full of unruly kids.
Kaseya Connect 2013, check!
I am very pleased to announce yet another wonderful and very successful Kaseya user conference. Kaseya Connect 2013 was held April 29 – May 1 at the Four Seasons Las Vegas. Our largest user conference to date, we had more than 700 in attendance and 35 sponsors. Conference goers came in from 24 countries and as far as Australia, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Sweden and Brazil.
Connect was packed with educational and fun events, including a golf tournament, insightful keynotes, customer presentations and expert panels, product demo sessions, an experts lab, vertically focused breakout sessions and a feature presentation by former professional boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard.
Our goal for Connect 2013 was to bring customers, partners and industry experts together to share new ideas and best practices in IT systems management, learn how to get the most out of our award-winning Kaseya family of customizable ITSM products, discuss industry trends and provide a venue for peer interaction. I’m delighted to say we achieved all of these things. When polled following the event, 95% of attendees reported they had a better understanding of Kaseya technology and how Kaseya can help their IT operations and service delivery. Ninety-seven percent said they’d recommend attending Connect to a colleague.
In terms of sponsors, independenceIT (iIT) was a Platinum sponsor of the event and Autotask a Gold sponsor. Many other respected industry technology companies participated as Silver and Bronze sponsors, including Intel, Kaspersky Labs and Axcient. To see a full list, go to the conference site.
And don’t just take it from me, this is what others had to say about Kaseya Connect 2013:
“Kaseya Connect 2013 was a home run of positive, productive energy and real relationships! Kaseya’s renewed emphasis on personal relationships with their customers, and with their key third-party partner program allies, such as HEROware, made this event an extremely high ROI investment for us. Industry events should be about deepening relationships, creating new ones and forming a measurable sales ROI. By those standards, for HEROware, Connect 2013 hit it out of the park,” said Rob Ryan, president of HEROware.
“This was the most productive Kaseya Connect to date! Great speakers, great content and the opportunity for the industry experts to provide quality business content to assist Kaseya customers in growing their business,” said Larry Schulze, co-founder and principal consultant for The Taylor Business Group.
“Kaseya Connect provided me with a terrific opportunity to network with my peers. In doing so, I advanced my understanding of the Kaseya family of products and ultimately improve service to my customers,” an unnamed IT manager.
Kaseya Connect 2014 will be held April 14 – 16 at the Four Seasons Las Vegas – only 11 months away! See you there!
2 Major Headaches for Enterprise IT Security Pros
Today’s enterprise IT manager faces two major headaches: unplanned network growth and increased mobile device use. These all-too-common pain points complicate the lives of already-overwhelmed IT managers who know that a security attack can bring a lot of misery to themselves and their companies.
Successful security attacks occur at a rate of 1.8 weekly*, making the job of securing enterprise IT a daunting task. Doing the job right hardly gets you noticed by top brass, but when something goes wrong, IT managers are put under scrutiny as they drop everything to fix the problem. Of course, a security breach is when you least want to be noticed.
The Kaseya Platform: Born to Be Secure
Today’s enterprise network requires multiple layers to defend against zero-day attacks, advanced persistent threats, targeted attacks, phishing, worms, and a never-ending stream of viruses. Security, therefore, has to be a core function of any IT systems management platform, and that is precisely what enterprises get with The Kaseya© platform.
Continue Reading…
Inspector General Questions Army’s Readiness to Securely Deploy Mobile Devices
In the private and public sectors, enterprise IT managers have had various degrees of success in managing the security risks of off-the-shelf mobile devices on their networks. For the CIO of the United States Army, the problem of maintaining network security in an environment that includes commercial mobile devices (CMDs) is of special importance.
After testing Apple iOs and Android-powered CMDs in the field and administrative offices, the Army Vice-Chief of Staff directed the Army CIO to begin to procure them in 2009 to replace some more costly dedicated hardware and software devices. Recently, the Inspector General’s Office examined how well the Army has been doing at tracking, configuring and maintaining the security of mobile devices on its networks.
The auditors limited themselves to devices running Apple iOs, Android and Windows Mobile OS and visited sites at United States Military Academy, Army Corps of Engineers and the Army Engineer Research and Development Center.
They found that the Army’s CIO “did not implement an effective cybersecurity program for CMDs” and that the CIO did not “appropriately track CMDs and was unaware of more than 14,000 CMDs used throughout the Army.”
Army Mobile Device Management Audits
The auditors concluded that the sites they visited were not using mobile device management to consistently configure devices to protect stored information and that none of them had the capacity to wipe data stores on CMDs that were lost or stolen. Further the auditors concluded that CIOs at USMA and the Army Corps of Engineers Research Center were “allowed to store sensitive data on CMDs that acted as removable storage devices.” The CIOs at these facilities did not offer any training on securing the devices or have users sign any agreements.
The auditors concluded that the deficiencies occurred because the Army CIO “did not develop a clear and comprehensive policy for mobile device management” and “inappropriately concluded that CMDs were not connecting to Army networks and storing sensitive information.” Read the Inspector General’s full report here.
In other words, no integrated system was in place to help CIOs of the various commands to discover, audit and proactively, consistently manage and secure mobile devices. A tool like Kaseya’s Mobile Device Management is a great place to start.
Network Discovery – If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Manage It
Network discovery is the process of identifying devices attached to a network. It establishes the current state and health of your IT infrastructure. It’s essential… without visibility into your entire environment you can’t successfully accomplish even the basics of asset management or network management. Network discovery should not be a snapshot in time, but a continuous ongoing process in real-time. Every IT management process depends on the reliability of the network discovery procedure.
How to follow Kaseya Connect 2013 from anywhere!
Kaseya Connect 2013 is here and no matter where you are we have a way for you to learn, connect, and explore the largest Kaseya user conference ever!
Watch the LIVE stream so you don’t miss any of the latest insights from Kaseya executives, product and industry experts.
Throughout the conference there will be opportunities to discuss and network both in person and online with the very best MSPs and IT professionals in the world so don’t be shy. You don’t want to miss out.
There’s lots of way to follow the latest:
- Follow @KaseyaCorp on twitter
- Use the #KaseyaUC hashtag
- Sign up for daily blog updates
- Check us out, and LIKE us on Facebook
- Share your experience on LinkedIn
- Don’t forget to add us to your circles in Google+
- We’ll be tracking the work AND the play on Instagram
- Or, you can always send photos to KaseyaUC@kaseya.com
No matter where you post/share during the show be sure to use #KaseyaUC so that we can all learn and experience Kaseya Connect 2013 together!
Executive Perspective: Mark Sutherland, President.
2013 is shaping up to be a strong year here at Kaseya. Version 6.3 brings IT automation to a whole new level. The new Discover module, included with every 6.3 system, takes LanWatch to the next level by consolidating all discovery techniques into a single, easy to use automatic tool.
- Scans multiple subnets
- Pass 1 quickly discovers all devices
- Pass 2 deep scans each discovered device and automatically classifies them
- Automatically deploys agents
- Automatically maintains and monitors based on classification via policy
The notification bar, at the top of every screen, tracks open tickets, alerts, system issues, messages, and much more. Get quick status and calls to action without interrupting your current working screen.
As you work, imagine a phone call comes in from one of your users. Quick Search, in the upper right hand corner of the notification bar, finds that user’s machine instantly by typing in any piece of information about the user including: name, phone number, company, etc. Quick Search checks over 30 fields allowing you to find that machine before the user can even describe the problem. And of course both Quick View and Live Connect are directly accessible from the search results.
Don’t forget to sign up for this year’s Kaseya Connect conference in Las Vegas from April 29th through May 1st. As always, the event is packed with information and loads of fun. The conference includes:
- Pre-conference in-depth Kaseya training
- Best practice sessions
- Industry Expert labs
- Sneak peek at what’s coming
- As a special treat this year we have Sugar Ray Leonard as a guest speaker.
In addition, take advantage of great networking opportunities with the Kaseya team and your peers. This event always sells out so register today!
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