Host:
Welcome back to the Endpoint Management Podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Gary Walker about why a peer-to-peer architecture is so much simpler, easier, and more efficient than deploying tons of servers for endpoint management. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes with Gary about how P2P delivers huge reductions in cost, and associated overhead and maintenance, and also why it's so much more resilient when compared to BITS and TCP. As always links are in the show notes, or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Gary Walker:
Hi, I'm Gary Walker. I'm the Director of Strategic Engagements at Adaptiva, and I've been with the company for quite a long time. Prior to that, I was an SCCM architect. And one of the things that I learned during my time architecting solutions is the pains that it takes to architect a solution without the addition of a peer-to-peer solution. I was working on a customer where we walked in the first thing you do is you sit down and you need to get a lay of the land, and you ask them how many sites they have. And I got three different answers from across the room, and it's like, this is going to be fun, because I need to know where those sites are to put this infrastructure out there. I need to know where to put those distribution points.

Gary Walker:
Then I asked them for a network topology diagram and they laughed at me, and I'm thinking, this is going to be even better. Then I needed to know the standing utilization, and they didn't even know where their links were going to. So it was... And I'm sure that you've run into this when you've tried to architect a solution, and then you try to get that and it's not a point in time because it's fluid, right, it changes. So I architect the solution and then two days later, the network team makes network changes and I didn't know about it, and now I have a site that's not working.

Gary Walker:
Well, that's where a peer-to-peer solution comes into play, where we can dynamically manage that bandwidth so that it doesn't matter whether I'm on a T1 link or an S3 link or a 10 gigabit fiber link, because we're going to dynamically manage that bandwidth, we're going to adjust based upon whatever the standing utilization is, and I don't have to deploy any infrastructure. I don't have to have any distribution points for config manager to operate in the smallest to the largest environments.

Gary Walker:
We replace all that with Adaptiva OneSite being able to do peer-to-peer fan outs across not only on-prem machines, but over VPN and our customers have... And we had one customer that went from 1500 people over VPN to 95,000, with everybody working remote the last year and a half. That posed significant challenges to them, where we were able to come to market with a cloud solution that offloaded that traffic for them. So we can handle that content anywhere, whether they're on-prem, VPN, or just on the internet. So we can do that dynamically without any infrastructure.

Gary Walker:
One of the other things that peer-to-peer helps you with is we don't have to manage the boundaries. If you've managed your config manager environment, you know how tough it is to maintain those boundaries and then assign those boundaries to the correct distribution point. Not to mention you have to also configure throttling. You're going to throttle that network to whatever the network team says, and they're always going to tell you to throttle it so that it doesn't impact them. And you're going to cap that bandwidth. So let's say they say you can have 20% of the network bandwidth. Well, that's great, you're getting 20% of the network bandwidth, but what about on Saturday and Sunday? Shouldn't you be able to get more? Or what about after hours when there's... If there's 70% free capacity on that link and you're down here at 20%, that means there's 50% of bandwidth that's just going to waste. Adaptiva's going to make use of that by dynamically adjusting.

Gary Walker:
In your config manager configuration with Adaptiva, you'll set one boundary, one large boundary, and then we handle everything else. We dynamically create offices based upon the IP information from the client, so that you don't have to do anything. We have a very large customer with over 16,000 locations, and I asked him the other day, I said, "What do you do when the network team creates a new subnet?" And he said, "Nothing, because it automatically comes up, Adaptiva automatically identifies it," and they were able to provide us business logic that we put into an automated workflow that would look at the machine name, and, based on that name, it had enough information in there for us to determine the location of that machine. We would automatically look up, see if there's an existing office, and we would add that machine to the existing office. If there wasn't, we automatically create a new one. So they're managing an extremely large environment with 16,000 locations, and they don't have to do anything when the network makes a change.

Gary Walker:
Another important thing is to make sure that your client is healthy, because an unhealthy CM client is not going to get any distributions, not going to get your software patches. So you're going to have to make sure that those clients are healthy. And the more complicated that service is, the harder it is to maintain the health of that client.

Gary Walker:
The Adaptiva OneSite doesn't rely on any subsystems, so what that means is if WMI is corrupt on a machine, we're still running. If the visual C++ redistributables are missing, we're still running. So that means we can still fix those clients with our Endpoint Health product, and we can maintain that health in CM. Matter of fact, we can totally rebuild the CM client, and we do that for a lot of our customers where they have clients that are failing to upgrade in SCCM and with our Endpoint Health solution, we're able to identify the machines that are failing.

Gary Walker:
We've even created health checks where we parse this CCM setup log, look for specific errors, and based upon what error we find, then we go down a different tree in the workflow engine, and then remediate that. We were working with a customer that had about 1800 machines that they couldn't either install or upgrade. They were opening cases with Microsoft, and we were taking that information, putting it into our workflow, and then we were getting these machines that have been dark for months, and sometimes maybe even years, getting them back into their environment so they could be up to date on their patches and getting content.

Gary Walker:
So with our Endpoint Health product, when we run a health check against a machine, we assign it as a policy. And what that means is that even if the machine is offline, when they come back online they're going to get that policy and they're going to execute that. So then you're going to get instant results back from the machines that are online, but then over the course of time, that number is going to increase closer to 100%, as close as you can get to 100%.

Gary Walker:
We gather that information into a database so it's historically available so that you can do trending, so you can see, am I improving over time? How did I look last month compared to this month? Am I making the right decisions in managing my environment? Am I making an impact? We provide you an impact dashboard that shows you how many hours you're saving by running our health checks. How many remediations are you doing? How many recurring remediations am I doing? Maybe that's pointing to a problem area. So we give you this tool to be able to give you all that right in front of you in a single pane of glass.

Gary Walker:
With the new work from home and work remote model that a lot of our customers have adopted over the last 18 months, the need to make sure that every machine that's connecting to their enterprise network is patched and up to date on its compliance has become even more important. And the other thing that we've noticed is because they're not connected as often, or it may be more sporadically connected, that their compliance levels have dropped somewhat, and they want to get those compliance levels back up there.

Gary Walker:
Adaptiva can help do that, because we're going to make sure that all the components that make up your... If you're using WSUS, Windows Server Update Services, we're going to make sure that you have the up to date metadata on the client. Many customers don't even check that. If you don't have an up to date catalog, then you don't know what to check on that machine, so then you don't get complete compliance reports.

Gary Walker:
We worked with a customer just recently where they had 3% unknown and when we got drilling into those using our health checks, we were checking to see if those machines were compliant, and we found a large percentage of them were actually compliant, but their state message that got sent back to config manager somewhere got dropped, didn't make it back to config manager.

Gary Walker:
We ran a health check with remediation that resent the compliance report for those machines, and we immediately jumped their percentage by 1% just by running that health check against the environment. Because they were compliant, they just didn't know it. So we were giving them the tools to make sure that what they're managing is going to be as compliant as possible because with all these remote machines, you can't just send a technician down the hallway and look at their machine, They're out somewhere, and, to us, it doesn't matter where they're at, whether they're on VPN or they're just sitting in a coffee shop on wifi. Our health checks will run, we will be able to remediate them, and get them back to being in compliance.

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.