Posts

Technology Teams

Defining the Value of Technology Teams

Technology Teams are made up of a lot more than just the service technicians working with your customers. Every Technology Team is made up of a combination of people that account for every step of the Customer Journey. Sales, finance, even marketing…they’re all a part of your Technology Teams and enable you to reach your clients, making their jobs and lives a little easier and helping you stay ahead of technology.

Technology Teams are formed to deliver a unique set of solutions and services. Within one company, multiple Technology Teams can combine to form a resilient Technology Organization. ConnectWise provides a tailored experience to fit the customer journey by turning the ConnectWise suite into a platform of microservices. Building on the foundation of the Solutions Menu, we will focus on Technology Workers.

Building Value

As a business with your sights set on current and future success, you have to find ways to build resiliency into your business. A key way to do this is by building out multiple Technology Teams to continuously increase and diversify the value you offer to your clients. The more you can do to cover their needs, now and into the future, the more you’ll be able to serve the needs of your current customers and attract new ones.

Get Specialized

So why not just have one big team in your company, with every resource managing all of the information they need for each customer’s needs? Every Technology Team is going to have a unique approach to solving customer problems, whether in sales, services or billing, and you’ll want to have people dedicated to making sure those unique approaches are supported. Instead of overwhelming your team with the heavy load of understanding everything about every one of your customers.

No one can be a master of everything, so allow your Technology Teams to focus only on expertise in their specific area. By dividing your business efforts to focus on each specific Technology Team, you’ll be more efficient, your team will feel more in control, and your customers will feel like you really understand their needs.

Take the Lead

Once your Technology Teams are leading the way in meeting your customers’ varied—and growing—needs, they’ll be responsible for guiding your customers through every part of the customer journey.

Mastering each step of the customer journey for each Technology Team enables them to provide excellent customer service, laying the groundwork for long-term relationships that keep your customers happy and loyal.

Where to Start

Fortunately, you’re probably already doing this without realizing it. Do you have a list of services you offer? Those probably line up pretty nicely to some of the Technology Teams already. Now you’ll just need to conduct a gap analysis to find out what you’ve got covered and what still needs to have resources put toward it.

A gap analysis looks at your current performance to help you pinpoint the difference between your current and ideal states of business. Get started by answering these three deceptively simple questions with input from your team:

  • Where are we now?
  • Where do we want to be?
  • How do we get there (close the gap)?

Keep working toward full coverage for every Technology Team your customers are looking for, and seeing every client through the steps of the customer journey and before long, you’ll be meeting and exceeding your business goals.

This article was provided by our service partner : Connectwise

Employee Onboarding

Automating Employee Onboarding in Active Directory

Employee onboarding is a task that is ripe for automation. Spend any time in the tech industry and you know that Active Directory (AD) helps improve workflow and operational services. In other words, it’s critical to an IT organization. When hired, every employee should be given an Active Directory user account, an email mailbox, access to various operating systems, a home folder with specific permissions available only to them, and so on.

However, AD is a big part of employee onboarding that many organizations are still doing manually. In many companies, the helpdesk is still manually opening Active Directory Users & Computers, creating a new user, and adding that user to a specific set of groups. This ultimately increases the risk of messing up that person’s other responsibilities within their account. Again, this is something automation can alleviate! And this is where Kennected comes in. Because staff onboarding is one of those tasks that’s performed hundreds of times and rarely changes, it’s a perfect candidate for automation even used for dbs check.

So, how do you go about automating onboarding in AD?

One of the easiest ways to automate AD tasks is with PowerShell – an automating management structure. By using a freely available PowerShell module, you can create scripts to do just about anything with AD.

For our purposes, we need to create a script to make a new user account for an employee and potentially add it to a few common groups. To do this, download a copy of Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) which will give you the Active Directory PowerShell module. Once you do this, ensure you’re on a company domain-joined computer and that you have the appropriate rights to create new users.

In the Active Directory PowerShell module, there is a command called “New-AdUser.” There are lots of ways to use this command but below is one of the most common ways. In this PowerShell code, we’ll generate a random password and then use it along with a first name, last name and username to create a new AD user.

Here’s an example of what this code looks like:

$password = [System.Web.Security.Membership]::GeneratePassword((Get-Random -Minimum 20 -Maximum 32), 3)

$secPw = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $password -AsPlainText -Force

$NewUserParameters = @{

GivenName = 'Adam'

Surname = 'Bertram'

Name = 'abertram'

Name = 'abertram'

}

New-AdUser @NewUserParameters

That’s it! No mouse clicking involved.

Once the above actions have been completed, we can move on to another useful AD onboarding command called “Add-AdGroupMember.” This will add the user that was just created to a few groups in a single line:

Add-AdGroupMember -Identity 'Accounting','Access to App1' -Members 'abertram'

One of the great things about automating employee onboarding with PowerShell is that once the code is built, it can be used for one – or even one hundred – employees with no extra effort.
For example, perhaps you have a ton of new employees you need provision for in AD. By using the “Import-CSV” command, you can read each row in that CSV file and run the code we just went over.

This example assumes you have a CSV with the columns “FirstName” and “LastName.”

Here it is exemplified below:

Import-Csv -Path C:\Employees.csv | foreach {

$password = [System.Web.Security.Membership]::GeneratePassword((Get-Random -Minimum 20 -Maximum 32), 3)

$secPw = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $password -AsPlainText -Force

$userName = '{0}{1}' -f $_.FirstName.Substring(0,1),$_.LastName

$NewUserParameters = @{

GivenName = $_.FirstName

Surname = $_.LastName

Name = $userName

AccountPassword = $secPw

}

New-AdUser @NewUserParameters

Add-AdGroupMember -Identity 'Accounting','Access to App1' -Members $userName

}

These are only a few of the many user onboarding tools available when you automate employee onboarding in Active Directory. If your organization has a predefined process with specific rules that must be followed, this could be just the beginning of a much larger employee onboarding process that can be 100% automated.

 

This article was provided by our service partner Connectwise.

Technology Service Provider

3 Surprising Keys to Success as a Technology Service Provider

A successful Technology Service Provider (TSP) knows that in this booming economy, they must bring their “A-Game” to the table in order to grow and succeed. Similar to sports, true professionals know that it’s the dedication to excellence and the refinement of the little things that can deliver a huge advantage. Let’s take a quick look at the three areas of your Technology Service Provider operational game plan that can benefit greatly from one simple, and many times overlooked, solution–IT certifications and IT skills training for your team.

New Business Development

Having certified engineers can have a great impact on your ability to attract and close new business. To your prospects, IT certifications are strong indicators that you are committed to delivering the most up-to-date, highest quality service and expertise.

  • Posting your engineers’ certifications on your website demonstrates to clients that the best trained techs will be working their account.
  • Highlighting these certifications in your capabilities presentations highlights your drive to deliver the best service solutions available. Validation of your expertise from companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, and others can be an advantage your competition may not be communicating.

Operational Efficiency

Your company simply runs better when your techs are well trained and certified. Trained engineers are your key to operational efficiency and customer retention. In addition, certifications also lead you down the path of increased profits too.

  • Scheduling and delivering client service is what your TSP business is all about. Engineers with less training make mistakes, take longer to solve issues, and often spend hours on research and consultation. However, engineers with IT certifications and skilled training hit the ground running. They address and solve issues more quickly and easily move on to other assignments.
  • Trained engineers deliver exactly what your clients want–fast, accurate resolution of their issues; which leads to higher customer retention. Again, customer retention is a vital contributor to your profitability.

Employee Retention

Keeping your top engineers is the third key to Technology Service Provider prosperity. As the economy heats up and IT jobs become more abundant, you need a plan to retain your best engineers. Retention and job satisfaction are not just about salary and bonuses. True IT professionals are eager to learn and will respect and remain loyal to the organization that helps keep them on top of their IT skills and certifications.

  • Consult with your engineers and develop a long-term plan for enhancing their skills and certifications. Address their needs for growth and your company’s need for specific expertise, and make IT training a central component in your relationship with your engineers.
  • Find a resource that also delivers skill training for the IT business professional, because it shouldn’t stop at IT certifications alone. This includes team building, time management, customer service skills, project management, and leadership training.

This article was provided by our service partner : Connectwise

Watchdog your entire IT environment with Veeam ONE

With data becoming so valuable these days, organizations can’t afford to have their IT systems unavailable even for minutes. Monitoring your environment plays a key role to ensure Availability. You need to be alerted when things could go wrong and when it’s time to fix issues before they negatively impact your business. Veeam ONE does just that, not only for your VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments, but also integrates with Veeam Backup & Replicationand, starting with Update 3, provides visibility for Veeam Agents as well.

In this blog post, I will talk about some of the Veeam ONE capabilities that will help you keep an eye on your IT systems.

Categorizing your infrastructure objects

Veeam ONE helps you categorize objects inside your infrastructure by business unit, department, purpose or SLA by means of its Business View component. This business categorization is integrated with Veeam ONE Monitor, enabling you to monitor, troubleshoot and report on business groups of VMware and Hyper-V objects.

Veeam ONE

The Configuration tab allows you to configure the basic application settings

After adding business categories into Veeam ONE, you can start monitoring your business groups through the Business View tab in Veeam ONE Monitor.

Business View in Veeam ONE Monitor, showing a virtual machine in the VMs with Snapshots category

You can also build reports for specified categories of objects. In the Workspace view of Veeam ONE Reporter, when you select a report, you can either choose to get details on the entire virtual environment, or on specific business view objects. For example, if you group VMs by department, you can create reports for a specific department in your organization.

The Business View objects window in Veeam ONE Reporter

Using alarms

There are predefined alarms in Veeam ONE for VMware vSphere and vCloud Director, Microsoft Hyper-V, Veeam Cloud Connect, Veeam Agents, and for internal Veeam ONE issues. All of them are designed to alert IT admins when any notable events or issues occur in their environment. With these alarms, you can easily identify, troubleshoot issues and quickly act to keep business operations running.

If they are used properly, alarms can be a critical method to notify you about the performance of your virtual environment. It’s important to know that too many alarms can lead you to ignore them, while too sensitive triggers can lead to false alarms.

The predefined alarms are built on best practices thresholds and trigger when the parameters defined in the alarm are different against collected data from the virtual and backup servers.

 

Alarm details in the Alarm Management tab. You can create custom alarms for any kind of tasks and events

When an alarm is triggered, the Veeam ONE console displays details about the root cause of the issue and some ways of resolution. Veeam ONE alarms are customizable and you can edit them to fit your business needs by adding different rules, changing thresholds or assigning them to different objects. You can also choose to send an email to a group when alarm’s severity changes or to suppress an alarm during scheduled activities. Moreover, in the Knowledge base tab you can add custom text to help you with solving the alarm next time it’s triggered.

Alarm Settings

Performance and health state monitoring

Veeam ONE enables you to monitor the performance of your VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V environment through comprehensive charts. In Infrastructure View, you can find information about the latest alarms, CPU, memory and disk resources for different timeframes, as well as network usage details. As you browse in the Infrastructure tree, the Summary tab will display different information for different objects and the rest of the tabs will vary too as you move deeper in the environment.

If the parent object is selected, the Infrastructure Summary tab will display the health state overview, including the Host State, Datastores State and the Virtual Machines state.

Along the navigation menu, Veeam ONE Monitor also provides details about Alarms (as you saw earlier in this post), as well as very well-organized metrics on resource consumption. Here you can check the VMs and hosts that use the most resources (CPU, memory, network usage and more), but also the hosts with the lowest load. These stats are available for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

The CPU chart shows the amount of used processor resources on a machine where a backup infrastructure component runs. Graphs in the CPU chart illustrate the level of processor usage for every separate CPU on the machine. The Total graph shows the cumulative processor utilization for all CPUs.

Capacity planning

While Veeam ONE Monitor provides extensive visibility over your IT infrastructure, the Reporter makes it easy for IT administrators to obtain detailed analysis of their virtual infrastructure and helps to take the guesswork out of capacity planning.

In virtual environments, capacity planning is a critical task for housekeeping and allows IT admins to make correct decisions based on accurate forecasts. The first thing we can see in Veeam ONE Reporter is the VMware Capacity Planning dashboard, which includes few widgets that offer a sneak peek into the more detailed reports of the infrastructure.

Veeam ONE 07

The VMware Capacity Planning dashboards displays details about Hosts and Clusters, Datastores, loss of a host and how many VMs can be added to the infrastructure without having to purchase more resources

Now let’s take a look at the capacity planning reports that we have available: Capacity Planning, Host Failure Modelling, How Many More VMs Can be Provisioned and Over-provisioned Datastores.

The reports are based on collected and analyzed historical data and they are very customizable, allowing you to choose individual or all datastores, set limits for CPU and Memory, select timeframe of the analyzed performance data, as well as the period of planning.

Veeam ONE 08

The Capacity Planning report provides very detailed forecast on my virtual infrastructure

At the end of the day, the capacity planning exercise helps you answer some simple questions: Do I have enough resources for more virtual machines? When will I run out of resources? Don’t underestimate these questions, they may save you time and money one day.

Agents monitoring and reporting

Update 3 came with many new features for Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 and Veeam ONE 9.5, and one of the most highly-anticipated is agent management. Veeam ONE 9.5 now supports agent monitoring and reporting for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux, enabling you to have visibility into both your virtual and physical infrastructures.

You can have real-time monitoring and alerting for the Veeam Agent jobs managed by Veeam Backup & Replication servers that you monitor in Veeam ONE. To do so, go to Data Protection view in Veeam ONE Monitor and open the Agent Jobs tab of the desired backup infrastructure node. For each job, you will gain information such as the status of a backup job (Success, Warning, Failed, Running, or jobs with no status), backup job name, type, transferred data and more.

Veeam ONE 09

Veeam Agent jobs in Veeam ONE Monitor

In the Veeam Backup Agents report you can choose to include business groups (defined in Veeam ONE Business View) or Veeam Backup & Replication servers and protection groups. Likewise, you can choose to include in the report either specific Veeam backup agents or backup jobs and policies.

Veeam ONE 10

Selecting the report’s parameters

Veeam ONE 11

Veeam ONE 12

In my example, I chose to have a report for Windows-only machines with the RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 1 week, meaning I will get a list of computers protected weekly. On the second page, you’ll find a detailed list of protected and unprotected computers, including information like IP address, Backup Job/Policy, Last Backup Date and more.

Conclusion

Monitoring your entire IT infrastructure can often be overlooked. This is a mistake that can not only cost your business money, but also its reputation. Minor breaches, due to their complexity, can cause performance issues in virtual and physical environments. However, this can be avoided with a good monitoring tool that alerts you when things are not working as they should. Veeam ONE provides a comprehensive set of alerts and a very user-friendly interface that facilitates visibility, troubleshooting and resolving issues.

This article was provided by our service partner Veeam

Vendor management

Top 3 Questions SMBs Should Ask Potential Managed Service Providers

It can be daunting to step into the often unfamiliar world of security, where you can at times be inundated with technical jargon (and where you face real consequences for making the wrong decision). Employing a Managed Service Provider or MSSP is often in the best interest of small and medium businesses (SMBs).

In a study performed by Ponemon Institute, 34% of respondents reported using a managed service provider (MSP) or managed security service provider (MSSP) to handle their cybersecurity, citing their lack of personnel, budget, and confidence with security technologies as driving factors. But how do you find a trustworthy partner to manage your IT matters?

Here are the top 3 questions any business should ask a potential security provider before signing a contract:

1 – Are you an established and reputable managed service provider?

Okay, this is one that you’ll probably research before reaching out. Look at how long the company has been in business and who their current clients are. Are you confident that they can anticipate the unique technology needs of your business?

2 – Have you worked with other organizations who have technology needs like mine?

You will want to work with MSPs who understand your business and are able to make technology decisions based on your unique needs. Make sure they have a solid track record with other businesses of your size. If your industry has particular compliance concerns or makes heavy use of specialized programs, make sure they have experience with other customers in your industry. 

3 – What does your menu of services offer? 

Make sure they round out these services with key security offerings. To make sure they have basic IT security controls in place, ask them about industry buzzwords like asset inventory, patch management, access management, continuous monitoring, vulnerability scanning, antivirus and firewall management. The specifics of their answers aren’t as important as a confident, well considered plan. 

Security-minded MSPs’ will make sure your software and you web surfing habits don’t provide cyber-criminals with backdoor access to your systems. They will make sure your network is secure, and they will install antivirus on all your computers. Bonus points if they are forward-thinking enough to include Security Awareness Training. Make sure you understand the services that they offer, and ask if any of these services have extra costs. 

While these are not all of the questions you should consider asking a potential service provider, they can help get the conversation started and ensure you only work with service providers who meet your unique needs service providers who meet your unique needs.

  1. Ponemon Institute. (2016, June). Retrieved from Ponemon Research: https://signup.keepersecurity.com/state-of-smb-cybersecurity-report/
  2. Ponemon Institute Cost of Data Breach Study: (2017 June) https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach