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What are those VSA tools used for in practice? Can anyone in IT who uses them tell us. I don't mean what is sold as I mean what it is used in reality, actual op

by Paul_S 5y ago

What are those VSA tools used for in practice? Can anyone in IT who uses them tell us. I don't mean what is sold as I mean what it is used in reality, actual operations performed.

jcims 5y ago
Basically they give you mechanisms to run nearly the full gamut of IT operations remotely. Managed service providers will use these products as the foundation for their offerings...some of which are compete IT outsourcing, others are domain specific and some package it with turnkey products in which they retain responsibility to maintain the hardware. I used to run a small security consultancy and nearly got into this business to expand our operations and get some of that sweet sweet recurring revenue. The problem I found at the time was that none of the software companies selling products that I would use were building in a security posture that I was even remotely (hur dur) comfortable with.
aksss 5y ago
VSA is an RMM tool, remote monitoring and management. They work as local agents to report stats, events, sw/hw inventory back to an aggregation point (on prem or in cloud), facilitate software deployment, approve and deploy updates, script execution, device configuration and compliance, and broker remote screen sharing sessions like teamviewer. These are what they’re sold as and literally what they’re used for daily to manage and monitor thousands upon thousands of endpoints of all flavors. In a traditional on-prem Windows corporate environment these functions would have been offered by the on-prem Microsoft stack like domain services, group policy, WSUS, SCCM, SCOM, RDP, etc., and the overhead was enormous. In a diverse and dispersed environment, these toolsets have adapted accordingly - multi-platform, over-the-air, asset light. Now even internal enterprise IT shops use flavors of RMMs that MSPs would use for SMBs. MSPs can simply apply these systems to more SMBs via economies of scale, whereas an SMB could rarely afford the overhead of maintaining the tooling let alone the circus that is device management. So if you break an RMM platform used by an MSP the impact can be quite broad, and include larger enterprise IT operations. It’s easy to say “don’t use RMM tools, or switch to Macs”, but this kind of simplistic reaction belies an understanding of the environment and the need.

by Paul_S 5y ago

What are those VSA tools used for in practice? Can anyone in IT who uses them tell us. I don't mean what is sold as I mean what it is used in reality, actual operations performed.

jcims 5y ago

Basically they give you mechanisms to run nearly the full gamut of IT operations remotely. Managed service providers will use these products as the foundation for their offerings...some of which are compete IT outsourcing, others are domain specific and some package it with turnkey products in which they retain responsibility to maintain the hardware. I used to run a small security consultancy and nearly got into this business to expand our operations and get some of that sweet sweet recurring revenue. The problem I found at the time was that none of the software companies selling products that I would use were building in a security posture that I was even remotely (hur dur) comfortable with.

aksss 5y ago

VSA is an RMM tool, remote monitoring and management. They work as local agents to report stats, events, sw/hw inventory back to an aggregation point (on prem or in cloud), facilitate software deployment, approve and deploy updates, script execution, device configuration and compliance, and broker remote screen sharing sessions like teamviewer. These are what they’re sold as and literally what they’re used for daily to manage and monitor thousands upon thousands of endpoints of all flavors. In a traditional on-prem Windows corporate environment these functions would have been offered by the on-prem Microsoft stack like domain services, group policy, WSUS, SCCM, SCOM, RDP, etc., and the overhead was enormous. In a diverse and dispersed environment, these toolsets have adapted accordingly - multi-platform, over-the-air, asset light. Now even internal enterprise IT shops use flavors of RMMs that MSPs would use for SMBs. MSPs can simply apply these systems to more SMBs via economies of scale, whereas an SMB could rarely afford the overhead of maintaining the tooling let alone the circus that is device management. So if you break an RMM platform used by an MSP the impact can be quite broad, and include larger enterprise IT operations. It’s easy to say “don’t use RMM tools, or switch to Macs”, but this kind of simplistic reaction belies an understanding of the environment and the need.