ASRA — Turning on the Lights in a Dark Room

Assess Score Remediate Automate — The power of Methodology

There is a saying I've heard over and over in my career,

“the truth does not require your belief…it just is.” 

It does not hide behind velvet ropes or need you to speak in hushed tones. It just is.. 

I often think about that in the context of this computer science landscape I find myself immersed in. I combined this with the legendary advice from Andy Grove of Intel who said you simply cannot manage what you cannot measure or set a different way visibility. Counts.

When we make decisions in technology it is often with imperfect information or without knowing our true current state. for the better part of 15 years I have been an unapologetic fan of the assessment. I've found that having an irrefutable mathematical understanding of your exact current state gives you the very unique ability to take turn by turn steps from that state to your desired state.

I've found that all too often it's lack of success with new technology adoption has less to do with its features and functions, but instead in our ability to consume it. a mismatch in current state and technology needs is to blame.

Assess

For this reason when it relates to end user computing - specifically securing and supporting the nearly 1 billion users of Windows powered laptops around the world - there simply is no substitute and no excuse for not conducting an assessment. Knowing, who, what, and where your users are when they are   accessing corporate resources from. Most importantly are they a risk to themselves or the organization? This can now be known.   
Actionable data that previously would have required up to a dozen disparate tools consoles, and custom spreadsheets is now available, in the cloud. Not only that – it is your data so you should be able to use your business intelligence and visualization and reporting platform of choice.

Good data makes for good decisions - and as it relates to our new distributed end users and the hybrid workforce of tomorrow we need to begin today.

Score

I have often joked that one of the true miracles of computer science is the ability to get scale to work for us instead of against us as it seems to have done with the personal computer and Moore’s law specifically in the enterprise. for that reason the ability to score and prioritize what business units geographic locations application users or owners or any other business driver can now be taken into account and mapped with the technology under consideration we envision a traffic simple scenario where green means users are in an optimal state yellow suggests challenges or frictions to user productivity or digital user experience and red denotes a critical support or security vulnerability meaning by policy or best practice should be elevated and dealt with first.
Knowing that all organizations have different thresholds for different use cases we also thought it was important to give the enterprise the ability to tune their baselines and thresholds for scoring. While there surely are a number of solutions that exist to help with configuration and resource consumption scoring... Until now no one has incorporated security vulnerabilities as well.

Remediate

In conversations with nearly 600 system administrators from around the globe visibility stood out as the first step inelegant remediation regardless of the problem. what quickly followed was the ability to utilize what previously had been up to a dozen local tools from their new hybrid or remote locations. we thought it made a tremendous amount of sense to assemble the greatest hits of RMM solutions into one single pane of glass. Perhaps more importantly to also give organizations the ability to automate investments they have already made in solutions like Tanium, ControlUp or Microsoft Intune.

When those solutions are not available or don't make technical or business sense a rich suite of tools, preferably available as a subscription from the cloud is needed. Given the tremendous investments the modern enterprise has made in and across Microsoft technologies a core focus is on augmenting and extending those technologies and business processes.

Automate

While there are many clouds there is only one Microsoft. for that reason, going with an Azure native solution opens up incredible opportunities to leverage their existing artificial intelligence and machine learning offerings. aside from using core services and message buses to build our platform here at Remotely we were also able to leverage Microsoft power platform power virtual agents and omnichannel to deliver an incredible user and admin experience

We believe if it's something a sysadmin has had to do two times manually the third time a machine should take over learning how to deliver better service with each end user interaction.
the final frontier is to allow machines to manage this scale that we ourselves have created by utilizing them in additional facets of our digital existence we could not be more proud of what we have put together and we invite you to see if ASRA (assess, score, remediate, automate) Help you turn on the lights in the dark room of remote user experience.

We are highly confident that our platform together with this methodology creates a logical path to secure and Support today's hybrid workforce.

#NeverGoingBack

T.Rex March 2022