Host:
Welcome back to the Endpoint Management podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Alphaeus Mote, one of Adaptiva's Senior Solutions Architects about how the right tools for extensibility and automation can simplify and stabilize endpoint management in large organizations, including a case study from his own experience that shows how different things can be with, versus without, these tools from the experience of one large organization making the switch to Windows 10. As always, links are in the show notes, or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at Adaptiva.com.

Alphaeus Mote:
This is Alphaeus Mote with Adaptiva, and we're going to talk about how the software upgrade and operating system upgrade procedures within enterprises has gone completely insane and how Adaptiva workflows can replace that insanity with simple automation-ready workflows that deliver repeatable success.

Alphaeus Mote:
Let's talk about software upgrades and operating system upgrades for a second. Because of the amount of things that can go wrong when, for example, doing an operating system upgrade, and all the things that have changed over the years with Microsoft's new standards and things of that nature, pandemonium has really, really become the normal every day within IT. And we desperately need tools as engineers and technicians that allow us to get back to a state of normalcy when doing upgrades.

Alphaeus Mote:
So let's expand on pandemonium just for a second. Some of the things that you can expect to see when you walk into a lot of organizations these days are low success rates on the deployment of updates, software upgrades, and operating system deployments and/or upgrades. There's also the high risk of doing that particular action in the first place. There's a reason why updates don't get deployed on Friday because nobody wants to come in on a Monday with a two-day gap and no coverage and learn that the entire environment is down or has some major issue. So we want to get ourselves into a position to be able to deploy on Friday and be able to come in cool, calm, and collected on Monday.

Alphaeus Mote:
So that's exactly what the workflows and extensibility on top of Adaptiva's platform allow you to do. We've made it so that a lot of the stress can be eliminated and that the knowledge and repeatability can be stored in an application that makes it something you can review, refine, and build upon. We help you subtract complexity and maintenance costs in your organization over time rather than always adding them.

Alphaeus Mote:
One example of this came up many years ago when I was working at the U.S. Postal Service. There was the need to adopt Windows 10 into the organization, and they had already deployed it to pretty much their entire enterprise, but here came the time to upgrade Windows 10 throughout the various versions because they were going to be losing support for the version that they had installed on their endpoints. They had a number of network challenges, a number of storage challenges, they had small offices, large offices, when just using SCCM there was a huge need to collect data about a machine's upgrade status, to move the machine through an upgrade process if it was ready to be upgraded, things like this, and the tools that SCCM was offering just by itself were not really cutting it for the process.

Alphaeus Mote:
If you search online and you look through a lot of different blogs and ways, you will see that there is tremendous complexity to be able to do upgrades. Now, Microsoft does offer some methods to make some of these things simpler, but you kind of end up with a double-edged sword because either if they're simple and not robust enough, or they're super robust and highly complex. And so we're trying to look for the best of both worlds, where we can have a little bit more simple, but still get those complex things done so that there's not so much to do after the upgrade is complete.

Alphaeus Mote:
When Adaptiva was brought in, I was able to go into the Workbench Editor and design a workflow that would deliver content to an endpoint, run the Windows Set-up Analyzation Tool, determine what the upgrade status or capability would be for that particular device, record some information through the use of SetupDiag, then I was able to use those particular registry keys to send data back to the Adaptiva database, and then design a Power BI dashboard that would allow me to make decisions about the upgrade status of a device, and then furthermore, be able to then deploy the task sequence to a particular device as long as it was deemed ready to upgrade.

Alphaeus Mote:
Whereas before if I wanted to do that same sort of process between a workflow and just a task sequence, I would've had to design collection items or compliance items, compliance baselines, and then pull that data, evaluate that data on endpoints, pull that data back to the SCCM database, write a query. And they had tons of devices, over 160,000, so writing these database queries, trying to get the results back from the query took a tremendous amount of time and put tremendous load on the database. And so it was really, really difficult.

Alphaeus Mote:
They also had a custom process that they had put in place prior to any of this ever being done, where they had completely wrote their own Windows 10 upgrade procedure and it was really, really hurting the organization. And so being able to have all these capabilities within Adaptiva really, really did save the day and allowed the upgrade to be done more efficiently. And especially having to deliver a 4 gig piece of content, being able to do that peer-to-peer on an office basis was just a tremendous help. And also being able to deliver that content dynamically from within the workflow was even more tremendous because now we didn't have to schedule collections or packages or applications or deployment windows, we were able to just evaluate and determine everything from within the workflow and it executed within a matter of minutes. It was just a tremendous experience.

Alphaeus Mote:
And here's the thing about the custom process they had built. They had an automation team, they had a number of different overseers over the particular project, and they had developed a process that had taken the Windows 10 upgrade process and they had to, as I mentioned before, deliver that same 4 gig file that I had to deliver without the benefit and capability of peer-to-peer transfer. Because that was such a limitation, they had to rely on an additional tool that could deliver this file in an inefficient manner down to each individual endpoint. They would then have to mount that ISO, execute commands, and then the machines that they had had terrible issues, they had WMI issues and things like that, and so they couldn't always mount the ISO and then they had to perform remediations and Adaptiva was able to help there as well.

Alphaeus Mote:
And so there was just a lot of complexity that drove from us. They also had to get analytics when this particular information so they had to construct scheduled tasks that would run, collect information, send that information back up to a spreadsheet or a database, something along these lines, that would then have to be parsed out and then sent into a dashboard and things like that so they could understand how the upgrade process was moving.

Alphaeus Mote:
And so they were able to get some systems done, but everybody was in pain because the process required so much attention and from so many people and it was hard to get coordinated. And so as compared to being able to leverage the workflow within Adaptiva, that really did reduce the amount of people required, it made us more efficient overall. I would never want to be in a position again where I had to answer the call of having to deploy Windows 10 or upgrade Windows 10 across an enterprise and not have Adaptiva at my disposal.

Host:
Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at Adaptiva.com.