AI for Business with BCN

IT automation, your business can do it too!

• CMI • Episode 2

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This podcast series is all about keeping you up to date with the trends we are seeing in the IT and business technology space. 

We’re here to educate you on everything you need to know from a business technology perspective and provide a better understanding on how IT and technology can have a positive impact on your business.

In this episode we are talking about IT automation and doing more with less - Standardize, simplify and automate.  We're doing it but so can you... 

This week we have Duane Godwin joining me to discuss how automation has revolutionized the way in which we support our clients. 

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Peter Filitz:

Hello and welcome to the BCN Podcast. I'm Peter Phillips and I work with businesses in helping them understand how IT and technology can better assist them with delivering on their business plans, stay ahead of the competition, and equip their staff with the necessary tools to be successful. This podcast series is all about keeping you up to date with the trends we are seeing in the IT and business technology workspace. We are here to educate you on everything that you need to know from a business technology perspective and provide a better understanding on how IT and technology can have a positive impact on your business. In this episode, we're talking about automation, specifically the automation of our tools to standardize, automate, and simplify our clients' IT infrastructure. With me today is Dwayne Godwin, he's head of configuration services. So, Duane, it's been an interesting journey for you. You've seen the world change, I guess, over the years from a technology perspective. How has your role changed? Tell us a little more about what you're doing at the moment and how you're helping clients.

Speaker 1:

When I joined the company, I joined as a senior engineer. So I was very technology heavy. I still am. But what I noticed is that the various departments and so on were not really working in a standard way. I started to realize that we could use automation to enforce standards and compliance on the various machines that we were looking after. We had an automation platform called Kaseya, which our customers probably know as Vita.

Peter Filitz:

That's really interesting. And compliance, obviously, being a hot topic at the moment, because obviously that not only brings clients and businesses in accordance with industry regulations, but obviously from a security perspective, it's a big one. Why don't you elaborate a little more around the compliance monitoring and efficiencies that you're working with clients on achieving using automation?

Speaker 1:

Yes, so security is obviously a huge hot topic at the moment. We are seeing clients trying to get insurance and having to ensure that their machines, their infrastructure, and so on is compliant with the requirements of the insurance. As CMI, we are having to enforce two-factor authentication at various points during our work, which is a bit of a pain, but it's an absolutely necessary thing. What I am looking at is trying to make sure that the machines are compliant. So we need to be able to report whether there's a login restriction to make sure that only the right people are logging into the right systems. We need to make sure that antivirus and other security products are installed and functional. So the thing is with automation, there are various elements to it. And one of them is enforcing these requirements and then also to be able to report back because it's no use just sending out an instruction to make sure that something is compliant without being able to come back and report, possibly to your insurance company or to you other IT people that need to know whether the machines are compliant or not.

Peter Filitz:

And I know personally over the years, having looked after businesses that span multiple geographical regions, one of the big challenges we always had relying on human intervention and doing it manually was when you had businesses in different time zones, different countries with their digital assets and endpoints spread across the world, trying to enforce a standard and deploy the necessary security services and policies was near enough impossible. And I know the work you did with the team and using Vita and Caseya, that obviously was a game changer for us as a service provider in the sense that we could now systematically enforce a global standard across our clients' infrastructure using automation and using technology to work more efficiently. One of the key benefits to automation and the systems we have now in place is working with large businesses for deploying applications across multiple geographical regions, hundreds, if not thousands, of endpoints pretty quickly and efficiently.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so this is actually quite an important part of our policy management and so on as well. We've created quite a lot of installers and uninstallers as well for customers. The more common ones, such as Google Chrome and so on. They're used for nearly every customer there is, but it's quite common for a customer to come to us and say, we're putting in a new system, we need this software installed. Because we have these installer templates, it can be quite simple to create installers. Testing is obviously a very important part of it. So we have some test machines. We'll spread the rollout further, perhaps in one or two more stages. And uh obviously we are able to then just deploy software. I did four Microsoft applications yesterday for a client that needs them as a prerequisite for some new software, and we probably rolled them out in 15, 20 minutes or so on, and they were 150 machines, and I believe it was seven countries.

Peter Filitz:

That's a real game changer, right? Back in the day, something like that would probably take you a few weeks rather than 15 minutes to do. And that's just one example of many where automation is revolutionizing the industry that we're in, and like we said before, it's now possible across the board of many different applications. Tell us a little bit about some of the more recent projects you've undertaken. I know last week there was obviously again in the news a big ransomware alert, and obviously it was imperative these security updates were pushed out to our clients' endpoints quickly and effectively to mitigate that risk. Tell us a bit about the afternoon you were made aware and how quickly, using the technology and the services you have available now, you could update our clients' infrastructure and uh assist them with making sure they are adequately protected.

Speaker 1:

I'm quite a security geek, so I follow a lot of these things quite closely, and and obviously my role it's quite pertinent. So I often see stuff before it hits the news. Last week was it's not a new ransomware attack particularly, but it is starting to spread and gain a lot of traction. It's now noisy enough that we need to do something about it. So I get probably one of these every two months or so, and I suspect a lot of our clients don't actually realize the work that we do sort of under the hood. Normally, what we do is assess what the danger is, does it affect our clients, what the potential damage could be. This was quite serious, so the next step is to see whether there's a patch available. In this case, it would have been from Microsoft, however, there's not. What we then do is see what we can do ourselves to prevent any sort of attack. So this um attack was mostly by email. You would have been sent a phishing email, you clicked a link, and this would allow it to mount a certain type of file. So what we did with these settings was prevent this kind of file being mounted. We also assessed whether that would actually impact any business operations and so on. We actually test all of our stuff on ourselves first. The bonus is we're protected first. The drawback is if the fix causes issues, we get the issues first. So um we tested it, and I would say probably within about four to five hours we had the fix identified, tested, and rolling out to our clients.

Peter Filitz:

And that's roughly 10,000 endpoints that are all through a script, uh, just to give our audience a little more background. What we create is a script which essentially tells our software applications on the endpoints to go and run a set of commands in changing certain settings, which will either prevent an application, malicious application, from installing, which essentially then opens up a back door to the hackers. And by using automation, we can simulate that process across thousands of endpoints within minutes, which has obviously been a game changer for us as a business given what we do. Elaborating a little more on the efficiencies and the standardization, I guess. Standardization has obviously been a key topic. I know for you when you joined the business, the one thing we needed was to standardize our processes and procedures and as such our clients' infrastructure as well, bringing them in line with the industry best practices. So, from an efficiencies perspective, I know automation for installing and building applications in accordance with company standards, um, rolling out new new machines. Obviously, Microsoft is their version of autopilot. Where is what we're doing a little different to autopilot in the sense that you can now build and roll out individual machine builds using this automation?

Speaker 1:

I would say autopilot is very good and we actually use it for certain things. It definitely has its place. The benefit of our um Cassaio system is that we have a single system which is able to reach out to all of our 10,000 plus machines. With autopilot, each client has their own autopilot. So let's say I was to want to apply a setting on various machines, I would need to find out which clients have autopilot, but I would need to jump into each of the autopilot tenants. So let's say we have 150 customers, I would have to put that script in 150 different systems. With what we are using now, we just do it once and then we can roll it out. I just wanted to also mention the policy management. We have a standard set of policies which contains various settings. Um, and our automation is targeted. For example, if you install our Kissai agent on a server, it will receive certain monitoring applied, uh certain updates applied, and certain settings applied. Whereas if you install it on an Apple machine or a desktop, it would have different stuff. And all of these settings are applied automatically. This is very important. So if you introduce a new machine or you buy 50 machines, all of those settings are automatically applied to the machines. We don't have to go worry about have we applied this fix, are we perhaps limiting access to the USB drives? Whatever policies we have created for an organization, one of our clients, they put a new machine in, they get all the settings, and we know that clients are safe.

Peter Filitz:

And that is especially pertinent to businesses that are looking at undertaking their security accreditations. You know, if you take, for example, Cyber Essentials Plus, one of the key requirements for attaining that is being able to demonstrate that all devices on the network accessing company data and email have a certain set of security policies implemented. And Duane, am I right in saying given our ISO 2701 accreditation, that is the sort of framework a lot of our policies and procedures are built around for ensuring that level of security. So that is a great way of being able to bring a lot of those key principles and frameworks to our clients and their networks.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I've one of our teams uh actually does quite a bit more on compliance and security. What people may not be aware of, there are a few applications which are now end of life and need to be removed. So we actually have a method to remove Internet Explorer, bless it. Adobe Flash, which is uh well end of life, and uh something called Microsoft Silverlight, which you may or may not be aware of. So removing these applications then allows the machines to be compliant with uh various security standards.

Peter Filitz:

And that's a good point, and that is often the challenge businesses have, and they are obviously quite reluctant in pursuing these accreditations or making these changes because they always see it as a potentially a large, cumbersome project, especially if they have their uses spread out across multiple locations. But using technology and using automation, what used to be manual labor-intensive jobs can now be done fairly quickly, efficiently, and more importantly, cost-effectively, right? Because the technology's there and we've spent the time in developing and building it, but we saw for ourselves that if we want to stay ahead of the curve and provide our clients with the service that they have come to expect, then you know you need to embrace technology and automation to help deliver that. And it's interesting, automation stretches as far and wide as our industry does. I mean, we've touched today on one side of automation, which is really the tools and the technologies that we use to support our clients and their IT infrastructure. Obviously, automation can now also be used to facilitate simplifying and removing manual processes within the business and and their business applications, and that is something that we will most definitely be talking about in future episodes. Microsoft has done a lot on the Power Automate side of things through their Azure applications. And I know, Duane, that's something that you and your team will also be getting actively involved in. So, Duane, what would be quite interesting is to understand your thoughts around what the next sort of five years would look like from an IT support technology perspective and what you guys are seeing out there. Do you want me to give away some secrets? Probably not. Well, give us give us a couple of tasty bits there. No harm in giving our audience at least a peek at what is to come and what they can expect.

Speaker 1:

Something which I saw this week, which I think is very, very interesting, is something called OpenAI. You can search for that. It's a very new system and has generated quite a lot of interest where you can type in questions and it answers you extremely well. Google is probably a little bit worried because of the quality of the solutions that OpenAI is providing. You can think of something like perhaps one of our customers opens a ticket in our support system to say, My computer is slow, where something like AI would be able to read the content of what the customer is saying to us, and then perhaps provide or attempt some solutions. My computer is slow. Maybe these scripts will help, pop up a message and say, has that worked? Maybe address problems in a better way than having a human involved in the very beginning. Perhaps the person asked for a new user to be set up that could potentially be read and done. I mean, I I know we've seen how bad chatbots can be, but I I think we're going to see a lot better AI responses in the future, either providing information or carrying out some tasks.

Peter Filitz:

That's super insightful. And just before we wrap up, I would uh like to ask your opinion on what are the top three tips in terms of what organizations should be doing or asking from their IT partners.

Speaker 1:

So this is not really an automation thing, but as far as I'm concerned, the absolute top requirement is making sure that you and your colleagues are aware of identifying potential security breaches. The most important thing I think are phishing emails that could appear to come from your boss or your colleague and ask you to do something, ask you to open a link, ask you to log into your email system inside. I would say that is the top thing. The most common cause of breaches is the human. Probably then making sure your machines and your infrastructure is compliant. Different companies have different standards that they need to work to. Perhaps a medical company would would have more stringent standards about their customer data than somebody else. But the company needs to identify what standards uh that they need to comply to, and we can help apply those various standards. I would say that the third most important thing is for companies, businesses to realize that IT is not a necessary evil. It is probably currently the most important part of your business. You need to see that as where you are going to spend your resources and your money. Making sure that your company data is safe and you're looking after your staff, your customers, and so on. You need to make sure that your IT is as good as it can be because of the amount of criminals and criminal damage which we see. And we have seen quite a bit over the past few years, and people need to realize that perhaps a security system might be a bit intrusive, a bit of a pain, but if you don't have it, your potential to be breached could be awful. Having a GDPR breach could cost you thousands and even millions of pounds or dollars. So I IT is not a necessary evil. It is the reason for your company to be successful.

Peter Filitz:

I think you hit the nail on the head there, Dwayne. You know, that's what I tell my clients. You know, at the end of the day, IT and technology should be seen as a facilitator. Without an IT strategy to complement your business strategy, you're going to have a tough time in achieving your goals and being successful in what you're doing. You do, whether you're a school, a charity, a multinational enterprise, IT and technology is the backbone, whether you like it or not, it's certainly yeah to stay, and it is rapidly changing. Dwayne, tell us a little more about some of the work you're doing with the new clients that we're onboarding and the standardization that you're bringing in. I know that's your motto is standardise, simplify, and automate. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing on that front.

Speaker 1:

What's important to realize is that we have this big pot of tried and proven policies which we know are good. If perhaps somebody on the service desk identifies a problem and they manage to fix it, and they say this could happen elsewhere, we will actually create some automation to prevent this problem from happening elsewhere, which benefits both us and our customers. All of our new customers that come on board, they they benefit from all of these years of research, pain, and tears that we've gone through to actually create the system. As the customers onboard their machines, they will find that they become more responsive, their machines are more reliable. We we did a study a couple of years ago, and and just by adding all of these correct settings and so on, you're actually able to keep your computer for probably about eight to twelve months longer than you would if you didn't have these settings. So this tends to save uh our clients money as well because the machines are optimized, essentially serviced like a vehicle, right?

Peter Filitz:

And and that's what I think people don't fully appreciate and understand is that your IT systems need to be maintained effectively, proactively, and efficiently. And if you do that, they will not only operate without issue for longer, which minimizes the risk of downtime, but they are likely to see longevity, so to speak, on their IT systems. And and that is all now available and achievable using automation, using the technology. And I hope that today's conversation gives our clients and our audience a better understanding in terms of how we as a business in the technology sector is using automation to essentially deliver a better, more comprehensive service to our clients. And we can also work with our clients on automating some of their systems, some of their business applications. It doesn't only apply to necessarily our IT systems. Automation is now a fundamental technology and service that you can apply to many different departments, applications. Duane, I'd like to thank you for your time and sharing your expertise with us. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on today's podcast. If you want to find out more about us, the services, and the products that we provide, please feel free to visit our website www.bcn.co.uk. There you'll find a wealth of information and knowledge around the products and services that can help you and your business move forward. We look forward to hearing from you, and please, if you have any further questions or if you'd like to know more about the products and services we discuss on this series, don't hesitate to get in touch. Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to subscribe.