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.

In the Beginning

The Kaseya Virtual System Administrator is an integrated, modular platform that leverages existing systems to enable visibility, management, orchestration, and reporting across an organization’s entire IT environment. When Kaseya’s founders developed the platform they knew that without built-in security it would be like running on tires without tread, so they made sure that didn’t happen.

To understand Kaseya’s security roots you need to turn the clock back to pre-Kaseya days, when the platform’s creators Mark Sutherland and Paul Wong worked on a project for the U.S. Department of Defense’s NSA (National Security Agency).

In the mid 1990s the DOD wanted employees to use email, but – for obvious reasons – it had to be secure. NSA approved encryption and digital signatures would be necessary to protect sensitive information from prying eyes.

The solution was the Fortezza Crypto Card, a PIN-based security token for email access and user authentication. The security company that employed Sutherland and Wong at the time won a bid to develop Fortezza cards for 500,000 employees. While the technology was a great success, the NSA’s deployment of it was glacially slow. Three years after delivering the cards, Sutherland and Wong were surprised to learn that only 36,000 cards had been deployed.

“To onboard an employee the government took the card, went into a guy’s office, had him fill out some papers, trained him on how to use it, gave him a PIN and digital signature to operate it, shook his hand, and went on to the next one,” Sutherland, the now President of Kaseya recalls. “It was going to take longer than I was going live to get all those cards in the hands of users.”

A light bulb went off: Why not automate the process of deploying IT solutions through a centralized IT command and control center, a concept familiar to the DOD? The cards would be shipped to users and the rest would be done electronically.

Sutherland and Wong’s company wasn’t interested, so in 2000 they left to join forces with a few industry colleagues and Kaseya was born.

Drawing on their NSA experience, Sutherland and Wong started developing an IT services delivery framework for automated provisioning, remote monitoring, patch management, and software deployment and updating. The platform would have to work with an organization’s existing infrastructure to avoid reconfiguring firewalls and modifying architecture – the types of integration issues that typically derail implementations.

It was a given that the Kaseya framework, at its core, would be highly secure. “The fact is that the platform’s high security is more of a feature than a product,” says Sutherland. As Wong puts it, “Think of security as an adjective rather than a noun.”

 Certifiably Secure

Over the years, Kaseya has matured into a complete service management platform with security at its core. Today Enterprises have both SaaS and on premise options they can choose from Kaseya depending on which matches their needs better.

From a security perspective, Kaseya offers many distinct advantages including being the first RMM vendor to earn two key security certifications – the U.S. government’s FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) and the international Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation.

Anyone responsible for enterprise IT security knows how stringent these standards are. FIPS and Common Criteria certifications are extremely valuable at a time when attempts to steal private data and trade secrets occur almost daily. Over the years, network breaches have exposed the private data of millions of users, and in some cases they have put companies out of business.

The bottom line: From the beginning, Kaseya has offered enterprises highly repeatable, quality services to various endpoints, internal and external, remote and co-located – in a highly secure way.

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.

What’s Really on Your Network?

Network discovery finds all the resources on your network and provides detailed physical connectivity, device type and asset/inventory and configuration information. It harvests information by both scanning the network for online machines and devices as well as harvesting information from the network directory (Active Directory).

Discovery enables all these important functions:

• Automatic device type identification
• Consolidated registration of all IT assets in an Asset Register
• Easy drill down to details on network devices
• IT services deployed automatically (or selectively) to discovered domain or non-domain systems
• Asset management of devices running all operating systems (Windows, Linux, or Mac)

Discovered Assets on Your IT Network

Once discovered, you can:

• Navigate, organize and manage the assets
• Print reports of discovered devices including their category labels
• Add additional tags that allow you to assign IT services
• Deploy additional management software further enabling the monitoring and management of network devices

For audit/inventory purposes as part of the network discovery process, Kaseya automatically collects comprehensive inventory/configuration information across networking devices. You can capture device information such as serial number, configuration information including VLANs and interfaces and systems inventory information including current OS version and patches.

Whether you need information to support internal requirements or external regulatory requirements, Kaseya makes it easy to discover, inventory, map and report on all of your network components.

Learn more about Kaseya’s 6.3 Discovery module for your IT network.

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!

Last year Kaseya developed the Industry Experts Program to help our customers build stronger businesses. Kaseya knows that it takes more than award winning IT Systems Management software to grow your business and that not all businesses need the same thing at the same time. With that in mind, we created an ecosystem of subject matter experts to help you prosper and grow at any stage.

What’s most exciting about the program is that it is truly designed to address any business needs you may face, at any time. We will continue to add new Industry Experts, globally, vertically, and upon requests from our customers as you see gaps or particular needs arise in your business. It’s your program! Exclusively available to Kaseya Customers and tailor made to address whatever challenges you face in your business today.

We kicked off last year with a series of webinars that covered subjects including:

• Getting the most out of your marketing efforts
• How to create new service offerings
• How to gain operational efficiency knowledge
• How to increase sales, build pipelines and close business faster
• How to hire, manage and compensate employees
• Join ongoing peer groups

All of which can be found in the Industry Experts group inside Kaseya Connections.

We plan to continue this successful program by building out a series of Industry Expert workshops. Last month we held our first in Miami featuring The Taylor Business Group and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Here are a few examples:

“It was a great workshop! It is always beneficial to have the opportunity to compare industry benchmarks to your own information. It has given my company several areas to start a much deeper dive into and make some strategic plans and possible changes for the future.”

Laurie Watts, Director of Finance & Administration, Zeno Technology Solutions

“Absolutely the best developmental workshop I’ve ever attended. Thank you for hosting and supporting this. Larry was amazing and very knowledgeable of what was needed and as important, how to deliver it. The class was perfect and the synergy was felt by all. Personally I was able to take away a tremendous amount of ideas on how to grow my company, taking it to the next level.”

Sam Heard, President, Data Integrity Services

Luckily, you won’t have to wait until the next workshop to learn more! Our Industry Experts will be live at Kaseya Connect  next week in Las Vegas. This is our one-year anniversary with them and this year they will have an even bigger presence during our conference with workshops, booths, a breakout session, and a panel discussion.

We hope to see you at Kaseya Connect so that you can meet our experts face to face. Let us know where YOU feel an Industry Expert can help your business thrive!

Please let us know what else Kaseya can do for you. If you need it we can build it.

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!

We all have to deal with passwords.  It would be a safe bet to say that while that an average worker today has at least 7 different passwords just to complete their daily tasks, the average IT pro has at least 4x that many.  We enjoyed this little cartoon on passwords….have a great weekend!

Kaseya has a great feature to help you manage all those credentials, securely.

Its a powerful feature that allows for secure credentials to be stored and access to those credentials to be tailored for the roles and scopes of your users inside Kaseya.  No more techs keeping their own little lists of passwords for everything from the core internet router to the CEO’s screensaver.

Check out more cartoons from http://xkcd.com

Following a busy 12 months here at Kaseya, we’ve just had some great news – our IT Systems Management software has been shortlisted for one of the UK’s most prominent channel awards, the MicroScope ACEs – for the second year in a row!  The MicroScope ACEs (or the MicroScope Awards for Channel Excellence, as it’s more formally known) is now in its sixth year of celebrating both resellers and vendors that have offered the highest level of service, product and support in the channel and it’s an honour to be shortlisted again.

Our place as a finalist in the technology software category cements, not only the comprehensive, secure and reliable solution that has always been provided by Kaseya, but also the efforts that we have made over the last 12 months to make our product better than ever.  We listened to our customers and partners and, at the beginning of 2013, released Kaseya 6.3, an update to the platform that delivers enhanced functionality, performance and usability in an effort to increase productivity for all users.  This update has also allowed us to become the only vendor to provide both a complete IT systems management SaaS solution and on-premises solution, affording customers a greater level of flexibility and the option to consume services as and when their business dictates.

It’s not only our core product that we’ve been working on though – we also launched our Customer Advisory Council (CAC) and Partner Advisory Council (PAC).  These councils were set-up to act as advisory boards and offer insight into the market and the development of Kaseya solutions, allowing us to hear the thoughts of users and partners directly and, ultimately, provide a better service.  And, if that wasn’t enough, we’ve gained a level 1 validation against Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) to allow us to work with U.S. government agencies.  This complements the EAL2+ Common Criteria we gained in the UK in 2012 that gives us the credentials to work on government contracts globally – so with the two together, we’ve really widened our market reach!

We’ve started of the year well – we’re a finalist in five categories for the Network Products Guide Awards in the USA and it’s recently been revealed that we’ve been placed in the Visionary Section of Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools, for the second year in a row.  Now we want to continue the run of success and do one better than last year by reaching the top step of the MicroScope ACEs podium, but to do that, we need your help.  While the shortlist is compiled by a panel of industry experts, the winners are voted for by readers, so if you think Kaseya deserves to be recognised for all the hard work we’ve been doing this year, give us a helping hand by casting your vote before 30th April.

Fingers crossed!

In an earlier post, we talked a little about the importance of IT network discovery, the process of cataloguing and bringing assets on your network under management. Discovery gives you a picture of your network at a particular point in time and is the crucial first step toward proactive IT network management.

A few days ago, I went to cookout with some friends, one of whom has a three-year-old, George. Even though guests were constantly arriving and George’s mother was carrying on three different conversations, she knew exactly where he was.

The instant George zoomed around the corner toward the front lawn, she called him back into her field of view. George has a great mom. He’s so well monitored and managed that he might not escape close scrutiny until he gets his regular driver’s license.

As guardians of all of the precious assets on networks, we have to monitor a host of fast-changing processes and be ready to respond to any unexpected mischief on the network. Monitoring is made harder by well-known IT network management trends: increasingly mobile workforces, BYOD, migration to the cloud, ever greater amounts of data to manage, shadow IT projects, etc.

Great IT Monitoring = Great IT Network Management

However, high quality network monitoring makes a difference. Great IT monitoring makes great IT network management possible. A while back I developed an eBay habit (I’m in recovery now). As eBay has matured, some users improved auction watching and automated bidding by using sniping software. They won more auctions because they were using better network monitoring and management tools. In the largest human enterprises, monitoring matters.

If you would like to learn about the tools and tactics your peers are using to achieve more consistent, more trouble-free, more proactive IT network management, please tune in to Kaseya’s recent webinar 5 Best Practices for Network Discovery & Management in 2013. Join American Association of Community Colleges’ CTO Jonathan Nelson and Kaseya’s Ray Barber for a lively discussion of best practices to:

• Discover the current state and health of your IT infrastructure
• Manage your constantly changing environment through a single platform
• Quickly and securely gain access to machines, domains, users, network devices and networks
• Automate monitoring and remediation of issues – before they impact operations
• Deploy software, security and settings to all machines across multiple sites at once without interrupting users or business systems

Please make time. Come. Meet Jonathan Nelson. Learn how he uses Discover, Manage, Automate, and Validate (DMAV) to make IT network management seem as easy as child’s play. Catch the full webinar here.

I’m glad the National Hockey League strike is over.  Like many other pro hockey fans, I have an unnatural fascination with Zambonis. Charlie Brown once observed: “There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni clearing the ice.”

Before the Zamboni, an ice-shaving job on the rink was done by hand. Frank Zamboni invented the Zamboni 60 years ago because he was tired of closing his skating rink twice a day for a few hours so a half-dozen workers could scrape the ice by hand. Closing cost him money in skate rentals, concessions and other lost business. My back hurts just thinking about scraping a rink by hand. Not me, no way! Turning that job over to a machine was a godsend to rink workers everywhere. As a comparison, two generations later, automated disaster recovery is as much a godsend to IT professionals.

Thanks to automated disaster recovery and IT automation, a single tech can deliver files or systems and push a patch that fixes a zero-day exploit across a network that spans countries or even continents. He or she can ensure that all systems are online and patched by monitoring the entire network through a single pane of glass.

System Backup and Restore Automated Disaster Recovery

A few years ago, backing up data offsite involved wheeling a cart filled with reels of magnetic tape to a loading dock and waiting for a truck. Now with the touch of a button Kaseya System Backup and Restore can create full image-based backups of a system and all of its data with ready-restore points and transfer that data offsite in a flash.

Right now, you face significant challenges as an IT pro, such as securing end points in a world of BYOD, maintaining security in the midst of and rouge cloud implementations and coping with the arrival of big data. At the same time, however, you have IT automation tools that can make a single tech as productive as a whole department was a decade ago.

In 2013, I challenge you to make a resolution to find ways to automate disaster recovery and more of your IT processes. Thanks to KSBR, you can automate IT system backup and restore. Restoring critical IT systems should not be backbreaking. With System Backup and Restore, bringing a critical system back can be as easy as driving the Zamboni or scoring an empty netter.

Automated disaster recovery – Be prepared to ace any disaster recovery test!

Sources:
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there-are-three-things-in-life-that-people-like/565998.html
http://www.zamboni.com/

Photo: twominutesforchecking.wordpress.com

Approximately 14 months before Superstorm Sandy walloped Manhattan and shut down the NYSE, the impending arrival of Hurricane Irene had made NYSE put disaster recovery plans in place to keep the big board operating, even if its Manhattan trading floor was inoperable or inaccessible.

According to a WSJ article, the NYSE disaster recovery plan was staying open with a pared down staff but shifting execution of trades to their all electronic sister exchange, ARCA. When Sandy arrived more than a year later, however, NYSE-member banks and brokerage houses decided to close the NYSE for several days because they had never tested their ability to trade using a contingency plan and were not sure it would work.

The WSJ article notes how rare such closures have been for NYSE: Since 1885, the exchange has closed only 14 times because of weather, so maybe Wall Street thought disaster would never come. One of the questions that strikes me: If NYSE had disaster recovery plans why didn’t its executives ensure member banks and brokers had tested trading under the plans and were comfortable with them?

Some IT Disaster Recovery Plans to Think About

The lesson for IT pros: Consider what your disaster recovery plans require from clients, partners, vendors, and other parties. Do they know about these requirements? Do they have the tested systems in place to act confidently when a disaster comes?

One of ironies, given NYSE’s comparatively good record on weather-related closings, is that the closing of NYSE because of Sandy has created additional scrutiny from federal regulators worried that financial institutions are not prepared for natural disasters.

Nevertheless, taking a look at whether exchanges have solid disaster recovery plans is worthwhile. NYSE’s short term disaster plan will be filed with the SEC shortly. Its longer term plan involves deploying IT resources to fully automate trading so that NYSE could operate without its 100 or so traders on the floor.

Smaller stock exchanges have also learned from their experiences with Irene and Sandy. According to the same article, “Other stock exchanges are focused on distancing their main operations and disaster recovery systems in the event of a region-wide danger of transportation snarls.”

The article mentions one smaller exchange that had both of its data centers in New Jersey. The CIO is in the process of adding a center in Chicago.  Good move. Do your disaster recovery plans include offsite backup at a site remote enough to allow for recovery if a disaster affects a wide area?

Consider what your acceptable time to data is in the event of a regional disaster. A new module such as Kaseya System Backup and Restore is an OEM integration of StorageCraft’s Shadow Protect into the Kaseya UI. It can shorten your system recovery times from days to hours and from hours to minutes. That’s comforting whether a super storm or a pack of SEC regulators is on the way.

Try Kaseya System Backup and Restore today!

Source:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324582804578348630869906660.html?mod=googlenews_wsj