Ivanti Blog: Posts by

How to Start a Knowledge Base: Simple Yet Surefire Approach

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 18:36:14 Z

Early in my career, I made the jump from defense contractor to customer support agent for an up-and-coming IT Service Management solution provider. Being new to the team and industry, I felt completely out of place. After the initial product training, I was pointed to a lab computer and told to start diagnosing a set of customer issues. I felt completely lost.

Over time, with significant amounts of studying and leaning on my peers, I figured things out and eventually became one of the go-to analysts. The challenge with this method was that this vast empirical knowledge was locked in each analyst’s brain. When we lost an employee, we also lost their extensive expertise. Eventually, a knowledge base initiative was started.

Why investing time and effort in a knowledge base setup is a good idea

While there are some obvious reasons to have a knowledge base, like:

Speeding up the resolution time of customer issues.
Maintaining employee productivity and satisfaction at work.
Increasing analyst time-to-effectiveness.
Delivering consistent solutions.

There are a few not-so-obvious reasons to maintain it, such as:

Eliminating tribal knowledge

This is knowledge that's held privately by individuals with the intention of increasing their value, yet makes the organisation vulnerable.

Improving the perception of your organisation and products

Providing responsive, accurate resolutions can eventually lead to product satisfaction and customer retention.

Reducing IT support costs

If the knowledge base is tailored properly and made available to self-service users, whether through a web portal or a virtual assistant (chat bot), then issues may be resolved, without even requiring a call to the service deck.

This is sometimes called Level 0 support. Also, with analysts closing issues faster, their productivity increases, often eliminating the need for added headcount.

Where to start with setting up a knowledge base

Most modern service management solutions include an integrated, yet unpopulated, knowledge base repository that's ready to receive your valued input.

Even though there are many great knowledge base vendors out there, they may not be able to integrate with your service management environment. Also, while not a knowledge base solution, SharePoint offers a knowledge template that can get you started.

In addition to standalone knowledge base solutions, you may wish to consider populating your knowledge databases with packaged knowledge. These knowledge packs, offered by various companies, focus on topics like Windows, Office 365, Adobe, macOS and others. These concentrated, ready-to-use knowledge packs are highly valuable, assisting young IT support organisations with helping customers and quickly resolving issues.

While many organisations can utilise pre-packaged knowledge, most organisations also support unique solutions that require specialised knowledge. For an established organisation, that's been providing support for quite some time, they'll already have valuable information in the form of past support tickets that can be quickly put into a knowledge base.

If the organisation is new or a new solution has recently been released, engineering teams will be heavily relied on for initial support knowledge.

Nearly all modern IT Service Management solutions will have the functionality to initiate new knowledge articles directly from resolved and closed incidents. For example, Ivanti Neurons for Service Management has an action link ‘button’ that seamlessly moves key incident data into a new knowledge base template.

It also includes workflows to vet, test and refine articles before publishing. The challenge is that ticket resolution data is often not written in a repeatable step-by-step, easy-to-understand format.

Motivating busy support teams to convert and document past incidents into decent articles and to store undocumented data in a searchable repository is the challenge.

How to motivate your teams

The organisation mentioned at the beginning of this blog had a wonderfully effective method of extracting information from analysts’ brains. It used the carrot and stick approach.

First, the stick. As part of everyone’s yearly goals, each support analyst was required to produce a set number of original knowledge articles per month. The target was typically 5–10 per month, which wasn't unreasonable based on our call volume. Not achieving the target number impacted one’s annual review. To ensure superior quality articles were being submitted, articles were first reviewed for duplication.

Next, articles were reviewed for accuracy by distributing them to other team members for technical review. Lastly, they received a final review before being made available to the targeted audience, whether it be analysts only or both analysts and customers.

Next, the carrot. Articles were tracked for usage and analysts were rewarded by the number of times an article was used to successfully resolve an issue. A decent IT service management solution with an integrated knowledge base should support this level of reporting.

Based on monthly usage, analysts whose articles were used the most during the month to resolve incidents received a substantial prize at the end of the year – some gifts were worth several thousand dollars.

Throughout the year, campaigns were created to motivate and remind the teams of the requirements and the rewards. The result was the creation of a sizeable, growing and highly valuable repository of product-specific articles in a brief period.

However you go about motivating your teams to create knowledge content, it'll take a concerted effort and constant reinforcement. The rewards for your efforts will be worth it.

If you’d like to experience all the benefits a modern service management provider can offer, watch the full demo.

Take Care of Your Team: Improve Your DEX to Combat Digital Burnouts and Work-Related Stress

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 20:00:03 Z

The rapid digitalisation of work environments means employees are obliged to work faster and better. Achieving this means businesses are dependent on having happy, healthy, productive teams.

With 69% of global knowledge workers now working remotely, it appears hybrid working is working. A recent survey of over 10,000 employees by Ivanti shows that 42% have a better work-life balance and 33% are more productive.

Having the right IT tools is essential for employees to work effectively in a digital environment. According to the Ivanti survey, 65% of employees and 71% of IT professionals said that they could be more productive if they had different tools.

It is the responsibility of the organisation to ensure employees have the right equipment, training and support to be able to do their jobs.

When organisations deliver a positive digital employee experience (DEX), business outcomes are met. The survey found that good DEX improves employee satisfaction, increases productivity – on average job satisfaction boosts productivity by 31% – creates better collaboration and improves employee well-being.

The dark side of a negative DEX

However, when DEX is negative, productivity, morale and retention suffer. Nearly half (49%) of the workers surveyed by Ivanti consider the digital tools and environment provided by their organization frustrating. And, even more alarming, a quarter consider a lack of suitable tech to be a contributing reason for quitting their jobs.

Additionally, the omnipresence of devices and uninterrupted access to the Internet often make it difficult for employees to switch off. This has led to an increase in digital burnout.

Digital burnout occurs due to spending large amounts of time on digital devices. The demand to be permanently online is associated with high levels of tension, perceived expectations and discomfort – all of which can lead to work-related stress.

Evidence suggests that individuals experience stress when they find themselves unable to accomplish what is expected of them using technologies within a particular environmental context. In fact, the definition of work-related stress is “the imbalance between external demands and individuals’ capabilities and resources (tools) to meet those demands.”

According to the Health and Safety Executive website, work-related stress is a huge cost for organizations, causing the loss of over 15 million days of work, and costing UK organisations over £5 billion annually.

This is not just a UK phenomenon. The American Institute of Stress reports 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress, which is a contributing factor to mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Research in 2020/21 by the Health and Safety Executive found that work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 50% of all work-related ill health.

Why organisations need to act on improving DEX

These facts highlight that it’s in the organisations’ best interests to protect their employees from work-related stress, not only for financial reasons, but morally and legally too.

The good news is, by taking the right steps to support employees and provide the right tools, organisations can significantly reduce the risks of work-related stress and digital burnout. It is vital for organisations to understand the factors that are affecting digital well-being and the steps that can be taken to maximize the well-being of remote employees.

It is important for organizations to realize that employee well-being and DEX are not mutually exclusive. Every time an employee uses tech, that is DEX in action, and whether that experience is positive or negative influences the employee’s well-being. Initiatives that improve DEX will help prevent stress, digital burnout and increase staff retention.

“Technostress,” defined by Craig Brod as “ineffective coping with technology that results in distress,” can increase as complex technologies are integrated. Research shows that technostress affects job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee outcomes such as absenteeism and staff turnover.

How to deter digital burnouts

However, digital burnout is decreased by interventions that optimise technology, reduce documentation and task time and improve processes to enhance workflows. This means with proper use, adequate training and peer-to-peer support, work-related technostress can be reduced.

Organisations should aim to be proactive, instead of reactive, when preventing work-related stress and digital burnout. This largely relies upon supporting employees to be the best they can be, by providing them with the necessary tools.

With poor DEX cited as one of the main causes of resignation, organisations need to take a good, honest look at their DEX, to see where improvements can be made. Senior leaders must act now to ensure employee well-being and the digital employee experience are being prioritised.

How do you get started on the road to a great DEX? Check out our eBook to learn more.

Service Management: Firefighting and Fire Prevention

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 18:28:39 Z

In the face of major disruptive change, the organizations that succeed are those that do more than just react to new circumstances. They evolve. When it comes to addressing the unprecedented challenges that have emerged in 2020 and 2021, the most successful IT teams have risen and will continue to rise to the occasion by recognizing the need for a proactive approach to the waves of disruption.

As any seasoned firefighter will tell you, there are basically two ways to take on a fire. One is to direct your best knowledge, skills, and tools at a fire that is underway and bring it under control. The other is to take steps ahead of time to prevent the fire from ever starting. The past year and a half have given IT teams the opportunity to evolve their approaches both to preventing and combating the “fires” brought about by the pandemic and our response to it.

To understand how, let’s start by taking a look at some of the major causes of these fires.

Digital Transformation

Although digital transformation has been an ongoing priority for businesses for years, the shift to remote working models exposed gaps in many organizations’ DT initiatives. It quickly became clear that there was a lot of digital transformation that still needed to happen, and at an incredibly accelerated pace. This was especially true for business functions that were historically performed in-person or in a co-located manner.

Endpoint Complexity

Digital transformation and the shift to the everywhere workplace have created an explosion in the number and complexity of IT endpoints within the organization. IT teams have faced a huge influx of personal devices and network connections as well as Internet of Things and self-service devices to replace one-to-one human interaction. The management and security considerations accompanying this growth produce a sharp uptick in complexity for environments that were already, in most instances, very complex.

Shift to Product Teams

At the same time that IT is trying to balance keeping the lights on with these other concerns, the business demand for IT projects is rising – particularly projects to develop and deploy applications. Industry analysts agree that this shift is driving a move from project orientation coordinated by IT to a more self-sufficient product team approach. In the emerging model, autonomous product teams own the entire application lifecycle, including the support for those applications after they are in production use. And while IT may not be part of every product team, they are considered accountable to the business for the quality of the employee experience of technology – so IT typically maintains a governance role even when not directly involved with the product team.

Business Value Orientation

Finally, while all of this is occurring, IT is being asked to justify the value of capital and OpEx investments to demonstrate ongoing alignment with the strategic business objectives.

In the face of all of these challenges, IT has gone above and beyond to keep the business moving. There have been long nights, lost weekends and high levels of stress as teams do more than they could ever have anticipated to keep pace with the changing technology environment. At the beginning of 2020, there were dire predictions about decreases in IT budgets, but since IT became the hero of 2020, we have in fact seen those investments increase slightly. Several analysts actually had to revise their estimates. However, that influx of funding (where it has occurred) did little to relieve the stress brought about by the fire starters listed above.

In the face of those disrupters, the reality is that business-as-usual IT practices are not sustainable. IT organizations must take a leading role in governing and guiding the business as they continue to accelerate digital transformation, as they increase complexity and as they make the move to a product team orientation. Otherwise, they can expect to face growing operational and strategic problems such as a rise in Shadow IT – with the IT team bypassed and its budget diverted – and a lack of IT relevance in line of business service management.

Service Management Maturity

IT needs to mature service management processes so they can serve as the example and governance model for the rest of the business.

If you look at some of the maturity models on the market from analyst firms, one thing becomes immediately clear – maturity of ITSM processes is well documented, but not well-adopted. There have been attempts to achieve greater levels of maturity through implementation of ITIL best practices and automation, but unfortunately – despite the best intentions for deployment of self-service capabilities, service catalogs, CMDBs, workflows and more sophisticated processes like problem, release or configuration management – organizations have generally been unable to sustain ongoing management of these processes. Resources have been diverted and ITIL maturity projects have been relegated to the back burner – only to go stale and then have to be re-started again and again. On a 10-point scale, the average maturity of an IT organization's service management processes is about a 5.

While these projects have stopped and started, and the fires of disruptive have been kindled, the path to maturity has changed in a big way.

Service Management and Fire Prevention

Today’s IT teams must look outwards, not inwards, to enable the business to mature. IT has a key role to play in enabling every line of business and product team to adopt service management best practices – helping them to avoid the pitfalls that led IT to adopt ITIL principles in the first place. Enabling IT teams to scale to support this cross-functional governance role requires the introduction of new efficiencies. That's where modern approaches like artificial intelligence and machine learning come in – using technology to self-heal, self-secure and self-service the enterprise with hyper-automation.

The measure of IT effectiveness must encompass more than the value that technology contributes to the business attainment of KPIs. The measure of value must also factor in the employee experience of working with technology. Employee experiences is now recognized as differentiator when it comes to attracting and retaining the best talent at a time when remote working models have made the business world an employee’s market. IT is accountable for both.

The shift to a fire-prevention approach to service management focusing on the employee experience, implementing both pre- and post-ticket automation, and extending service management to the business.

Employee Experience

Employees are looking for quick solutions wherever they happen to be in the world. They need automated, interactive solutions that enable them to self-serve. The best employee experience involves solutions that enable employees to self- heal, or better yet, that proactively eliminate the problem before the employee even observes that there is an issue. A quantitative measure of employee experience, such as the Ivanti Employee Experience, can demonstrate how effective automation is in driving better Employee experiences.

Pre-Ticket Automation

A new class of intelligent service management solutions enable a ticketless experience by self-identifying, triaging, and self-healing issues before they arise. Leveraging hyper-automation, these solutions make support teams more efficient and more effective, enabling them to focus resources on those issues that require human interaction.

Post-Ticket Automation

These solutions also put new capabilities into the hands of the resources that are on the front lines fighting the fires. Embedded knowledge and automation enable support staff to leverage proven solutions to automatically resolve common issues. Machine learning enables them to triage issues in real time to reduce the mean time to resolution for issues that require individual attention.

Extending Service Management

A growing number of product teams, as well as groups such as HR, Finance, Legal, Procurement, Facilities, and others are discovering that service management has become a critical factor for ensuring their operational success. By enabling service management as a set of consistent, automated, and easily adopted services within the organization, IT can help these groups avoid the same pitfalls that IT fell into in the days before ITIL. This enables IT teams to establish governance over product team delivery and to ensure the best possible employee experience.

To learn how Ivanti solutions enable this next generation of service management solutions, check out our upcoming webinar “From Firefighting to Fire Prevention -- Service Management for the Realities of 2021.” You can subscribe to our webinar series here.

4 Top Patch Management Questions Answered

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 18:06:50 Z

Our sales team receives handfuls of patching questions so often, we almost brought in the bots to answer. But because the questions below require more explanation, I grabbed a few minutes with Ivanti’s patch management resident expert, Chris Goettl, for answers to questions concerning patching in the cloud, standalone patching, validating patches, and patching remote endpoints.

1. Can I patch in the cloud?

Yes. This often comes up when companies are working in different types of environments between on-premise and cloud environments. If you’re on network, you probably also have remote users, especially right now. Those newly remote users may run through workloads in public as well as private environments. The good news: Ivanti’s products work in all scenarios, including Azure, AWS, or other private-cloud environments.

Whether you patch in the cloud or on-prem, remember to reduce the time it takes to patch. With 14 days being the average patch-to-exploit ratio, the longer it takes to patch, the more vulnerable you are. Chris has more explanation on the importance of early intervention detailed here.

Full Video (75 seconds): Can I Patch in the Cloud?

2. Does Ivanti have a standalone patching solution or does the customer need Microsoft SCCM or WSUS configured?

In this case, Ivanti has options for both.

Option 1: In cases where customers are running WSUS or Microsoft SCCM, we can provide our entire third-party catalog plug-in or you can publish directly into Microsoft SCCM and manage the third-party updates alongside Microsoft updates.

Option 2: As an alternative, we have standalone patch management solutions. Our robust Endpoint Manager is a full systems management solution that displaces Microsoft SCCM and manages everything from configuration to provisioning to patching. Or, we have a security controls product, a standalone Patch Management solution, which covers the Windows operating system, third-party patching, and additional platforms like Red Hat and other Linux flavors.

Did you know that on average, half of your actively exploited vulnerabilities each year are from third parties? Check out Ivanti if you need help with those third-party updates.

Full Video (93 seconds): Stand Alone Patching Solutions

3. How do we validate patches from our vendors?

Ivanti has an amazing team of engineers—called the Content team—that monitors, tests, and validates patches. This team researches new vendors and expands our catalog regularly. They locate where vendors store their patches, download them, break them down, and figure out how to do detection and deployment switches. Our content team also does in-house testing, so systems accept patches smoothly and applications launch correctly post-patching.

The Content team is so critical, they were part of our disaster planning process. Before so many of us became remote workers, Ivanti conducted a successful stabilization exercise that added an additional layer of scrutiny around the Content team’s turnaround times. This ensured the same level of performance was maintained on- and off-network.

Full Video (80 seconds): How We Validate Patches

4. Do we patch remote endpoints?

We have a hybrid model supporting on network and off-network systems. Our Endpoint Manager platform, a full endpoint management and security suite, manages remote patching through the Cloud Services Appliance (CSA) gateway. For those looking for a stand-alone patch solution or patching in the data center, we offer our security controls product that uses a cloud micro service. In both models, networks run seamlessly without relying on VPN, one of the biggest bottlenecks we are facing right now.

In terms of remote endpoints, Gartner forecasts that by 2025 (in five years), it’s estimated that as many as 41.6 billion connected devices at the edge will generate 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data. Remember your remotest of remote endpoints need patching, too!

Full Video (110 seconds): Patch Remote Endpoints

If you’d like to view these patch-management videos together in one place for future reference, here’s the collection. If you have other questions on how to get started with patch management, please contact us or join us on the next Patch Tuesday webinar.

Adapting Your Cybersecurity Habits With Ivanti Neurons

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 20:46:29 Z

Tuesday morning you roll out of bed, turn off your alarm, tiptoe down the stairs, retrieve your paper, flip the hallway lights on, feed the dog, and start making coffee—in five minutes. Performing this series of early-morning tasks is called chunking. Certain neurons in the brain “bookend” the habit for you, signaling the routine has started (the alarm) and ended (coffee). This chunking helps you perform habits each day almost unconsciously, giving your brain more time to learn and potentially create new habits.

Survey Says: Adapt

Have you formed any new habits recently to help your security program advance?

A recent Ivanti remote work survey cited 66% of IT professionals experienced a rise in security issues this year since the workforce became mostly remote. In another study, more than half of IoT devices were found vulnerable to either medium- or severe-rated attacks. And earlier this year, a hacker published a list of credentials for more than 500,000 home routers, servers, and IoT devices. What is clear: threat actors have adapted to the recent climate and are pursuing your unsecured endpoints, old routers, and unencrypted VPNs. You must adapt as well.

Forming New Habits: Self-Secure

Intelligent organizations understand security should not be a reactive pursuit, but an adaptive, ever-changing function. You cannot predict every cybersecurity attack, but you can prepare. Enterprises should adapt to respond to threats they face as well as anticipate future ones. One way to prepare is to follow the CIS Critical Security Controls best practices. The top five controls are the most important:

inventory and control your hardware assets
inventory and control your software assets
apply continuous vulnerability management practices
control the use of administrative privileges
implement and manage the security configurations of your devices

The other smart thing to do is respond sooner. Most threat actors exploit vulnerabilities within a median of 22 days and most exploits have a seven-year shelf life according to a research study from RAND. The longer you take to patch, the more vulnerable you become.

In order to adapt, take steps to also become self-secure. At Ivanti we help our customers adapt into a self-securing stance to better understand threats. We break down our self-securing offering into three parts: sensing, prioritization, and remediation.

Sensing what’s in your environment includes discovering and detecting items such as software and devices. This stage analyzes vulnerabilities, and continuously monitors for change.
Prioritization involves seeing what is actively being exploited and responding to risk in the right order. Algorithms using predictive methodologies help anticipate changes and give guidance on the best strategies to resolve challenges.
Remediation determines what actions will fix the problem based on prioritized risk. Assessment of threats need to adapt to environments and circumstances. The more automated responses become, the easier it is to combat threat actors.

For more information on these steps, Ivanti’s patch management expert Chris Goettl reviews these steps in more detail.

Applying Security Habits

Our self-secure adaptive design is part of Ivanti’s overall hyper-automation platform, Ivanti Neurons. Security plays a role throughout each component of this offering:

Ivanti Neurons for Discovery finds and inventories all IT assets in real time to improve clients’ security posture.
Ivanti Neurons for Edge Intelligence helps with endpoint encryption and device queries to obtain real-time operational awareness.
Ivanti Neurons for Healing detects if endpoints and edge devices have potential security vulnerabilities so they can be remediated automatically.

Here’s an example of security in action from one of our manufacturing customers of Ivanti Neurons for Healing. This customer had challenges receiving laptops back from former employees. In one case a former employee was 3,000 miles away. Typically, 30% of assets are “ghost” assets that are lost or unaccounted for. These types of “ghost assets” cause data and security risks. The Ivanti team helped our customer disable the accounts in question by locking laptops and rebooting the machines remotely. Within hours, our customer received notifications indicating laptops were shipping back to corporate. As a result, Ivanti improved the customer’s overall security posture.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity threats will remain challenging as remote working extends and data from endpoints and edge devices grows. Ivanti can help you adapt your habits into a self-securing stance. For assistance, request your free Ivanti Neurons trial.

Ivanti Velocity and Ivanti Speakeasy for Fast Onboarding of Supply Chain Staff and Processes

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 18:46:07 Z

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a dramatic shift in the way all industries work, including warehouses within the supply chain. With each minute wasted—equating to a loss of revenue that many companies simply can’t afford in the current climate—productivity must be optimized. On top of this, businesses are mitigating the possibilities of staff becoming unwell and having to find last minute replacements, all while facing increased demand as online shopping continues to peak.

Therefore, the need for fast onboarding of new or temporary warehouse workers and processes has never been greater. Training new starters can take hours or even days, which is no longer a viable option for many businesses.

The foundation of a warehouse environment is its handheld mobile devices, such as barcode scanners. When combined with visually intuitive mobile applications and an optimized order management system (OMS), these devices are employees’ bread and butter. When implemented effectively, these systems and technologies enable retailers to fulfill orders quickly and correctly, each and every time.

For example, by utilizing the interaction of connected mobile devices with an OMS, retailers can ensure that products are scanned and recorded at multiple touchpoints while in transit from the warehouse to the customer. By providing enhanced visibility, this enables retailers to spot and resolve any issues (such as a wrong item being shipped or a missed order) before it escalates. Most importantly, connecting all supply chain processes with an OMS equips retailers with reliable and up-to-date stock levels for their websites, thus preventing customers from purchasing items that aren’t available. However, these devices require a certain amount of training, which can prove to be a barrier to fast and simple onboarding.

Ivanti Velocity: Software Success

Fortunately, logistics and supply chain companies can take steps to optimize their devices to maximize user experience and minimize training time. With Ivanti Velocity, businesses can migrate away from ruggedized Windows operating systems to a modern, touchscreen Android user experience. Not only will this move make existing workers more productive, but it will enhance onboarding as these devices better emulate the consumer mobile phones and tablets that new joiners will already be used to.

Supply chain businesses can also use Ivanti Velocity to personalize the display of their handheld devices so pickers only have access to those buttons they need to do their jobs, removing options that aren’t applicable and minimizing confusion. This also includes reformatting the device to accelerate task-screen navigation and enable the workforce to enter data more quickly and accurately, such as by automatically opening the numerical keyboard when it’s required to enter a password or quantity to avoid delays in picking.

Ivanti Speakeasy: Easier Said Than Done

Businesses can further upgrade their productivity with voice-enabled picking technology, such as Ivanti Speakeasy. Voice picking technology can be a hugely valuable tool as pickers can work hands free, meaning they don’t need to constantly stop to consult their devices and errors are minimized—they are simply told how many of which items to pick, and alerted if they make an error. What’s more, there is no need to train Ivanti Speakeasy to recognize unique accents or dialects; users can simply pick up their existing device and get to work with minimal onboarding time. Dorman Products, a supplier of automotive replacement parts, was able to reduce training time from several hours to only 15 minutes with the introduction of Ivanti Speakeasy.

The supply chain industry is set to face a challenging time during the rest of this year and beyond. As consumer confidence increases and consumers return to work, they will have more disposable income and demand will increase. Supply chain businesses must therefore be prepared to onboard new employees quickly and efficiency, and have the tools in place for these employees to be as productive as possible from day one.

Learn more about Ivanti Velocity and Ivanti Speakeasy.

Ivanti Neurons for Edge Intelligence for Our Fast-Changing Future

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 22:00:04 Z

The demands on enterprise IT are set to grow exponentially.

The Edge Comes into View

Edges. Many times, they represent an unknown—like the edge of space or a horizon for sea captains and pilots. And they give us mixed feelings—fear, anxiousness, direction, a sense of adventure. Most often, they represent a future state or location we are moving towards.

For IT there is a new edge. The Edge of computing. The place where things and people are connecting with our networked digital world. Devices of all kinds, the next generation of workers, automated bot assistants! And as IT professionals, that future place or state is rapidly coming into view. It’s predicted that 41.6 billion connected devices, or “things,” will be generating 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data by 2025 .

This rapid growth creates IT complexities in the forms of ongoing management and integration challenges, which not only affect devices but IT staff and end-user experiences. You might be asking how your IT team will adapt. What could you do if you were connected at the Edge?

Life on the Edge

Ivanti’s solution to these questions? One way is to help organizations mature from basic automation to a fusion of hyper-automation and deep learning capabilities. With this, organizations can self-heal and self-secure devices, and self-service end-users proactively, predictably, and continuously.

Ivanti Neurons for Edge Intelligence leverages our hyper-automation platform approach, making it easy for today’s IT Analyst to query all devices, in seconds, to get real-time insights, connecting them with users and devices from cloud to edge. And smart dashboards provide quick operational awareness to provide real-time insights that can lead to immediate action.

A Case for Edge Intelligence

Consider the following example. If company employees were experiencing excessive logon times to their devices, which hurts productivity, how would you know unless they submitted a ticket? Would you be able to determine whether this is an isolated event, or a larger systematic issue without a surge in help desk requests? With Edge Intelligence, you’d receive logon-time breakdowns across all on-prem, cloud, and edge devices. You’d see if the incident was singular or happening company-wide and be able to take the proper actions quickly to remediate.

In this actual enterprise example, the cause of excessive logon times was identified as single-threaded logon scripts and many Group Policies being used for desktop configuration. Quickly identifying and fixing the issue improved logon times to just seconds instead of minutes.

Wrapping Up

As it seems with emerging technologies, we’ve heard a lot about the future of the Edge over the years. Well, the Edge is now in sight.

Organizations can benefit greatly from Edge Intelligence and the power of hyper-automation. Accurately and quickly identifying the issues and moving to swift remediation reduces costs and improves IT teams and end-user experiences. In short, it’s a competitive advantage by limiting loss of productivity within your organization.

I asked myself the other day—do I have any IoT Edge devices at home? I had never given much thought to it, and I surprised myself by identifying four such devices, which was 25% of all my connected devices in my home. All connected to the same network I connect to every day while working from home. The growth is real.

Next Steps

Learn more and see Ivanti Neurons for Edge Intelligence in action here.

365 Days of Accelerating Your Office 365 With Ivanti Environment Manager

Mon, 21 May 2018 22:35:02 Z

Wow, it only feels like 12 months ago since I was at the Ivanti booth at Citrix Synergy discussing with attendees all the great benefits Environment Manager (EM) can bring to help accelerate their Office 365 projects. Wait a second, it was 12 months ago! Time flies when you are having this much fun.

Recalling back, what was even more satisfying was the real-world examples of how our customers were already using Environment Manager for just that. For the uninitiated, it has been possible for some time to manually configure our Policy engine to roam large application caches such as OST, OneNote and Skype GAL, and by introducing our best practices whitepaper, we made this a step easier for customers.

Fast forward from May 2017 to February 2018 and with the release of EM 10.1 FR4, we stepped up our game a notch further by making it even easier for customers to roam essential Office 365 caches with a set of new policy actions to provision and manage VHD containers and also effortlessly configure our out-of-the-box Cache Roaming actions for applications such as Outlook, Skype & OneNote.

This has been a great hit with customers and partners. But don’t take our word for it. Read an impartial view from Alchemy Group.

Below is a summary of the extent of EM 10.1 FR4’s Cache Roaming capabilities:

Note that a few of the items on this list have been attracting great discussions within our community, and it is worthwhile explaining further:

OneDrive: Having the ability to roam a user’s OneDrive cache massively improves experience within non-persistent environments, and we are very excited that we now have this working in the lab and can demo it on request. We’ll add it to the product soon! Voice your support via a vote on our User Voice portal here to stay updated.

Concurrency: Using our contextual Policy engine, customers can take the necessary steps required to ensure that users who may have concurrent sessions receive the correct behavior. Some of the common scenarios that are available today are:

Connect to a secondary cache if primary is unavailable
Configure the user’s session for Exchange Online mode should their primary container be unavailable
Or, even if the user’s container is unavailable, prompt the user with a message and auto-logoff their session

Example configuration snippets will be available on Ivanti Marketplace very soon to kickstart your deployment!

Search: Roaming a user’s mail search also frequently comes up in conversation. This is the most intriguing of topics especially since the advances in Outlook 2016 Fast Search, discussed in the following article, outlines the benefits of relying on this as opposed to Windows Search (and its legacy issues around index rebuilds).

Our testing to date shows minimal returns in comparison, and we welcome any discussions or experiences that may differ with our research via our User Voice portal here.

Beyond Cache Roaming...

We should also reiterate the depth of the Office 365 benefits we provide to our customers with the following range of out-of-the-box features for both physical and virtual environments:

Automated Outlook Signature Creation

Customised corporate signatures can be configured and deployed to ensure the latest template is in use.Combine with AD Session Variables as demonstrated here by Ivanti’s James Simpson.

Office Application Lockdown Wizard

Go beyond Group Policy control with our Lockdown Policy action to control access to all the key Office features. Remove or lock down content to help simplify the user interface for users or address potential security loopholes. A key use cases includes the ability to prevent printing from remote ICA sessions or IP address range.

Office 2013/2016/365 Personalization Templates

Apply personalization, on-demand at application start/stop, to ensure efficient profile management that can be managed from our central Web console.From 10.1 FR2, customers can also configure Geo-Sync to ensure a consistent experience where users may roam between geographic locations and require access to their personal settings from different Datacenters (Cloud or on-premises).

Office Shared License Token Roaming

Microsoft introduced Shared Activation roaming in Office 365 with version 1704 and by applying our templates as below, EM Personalization ensures seamless roaming of thesesettings across sessions.