The recent rush from SASE to SSE Regaining Control Whether or not a company still operates with a predominantly remote workforce, most organizations during the past two years have seen devices and connectivity needs sprawl well beyond the barriers of their local area networks. And after those two years of throwing up resources and dashing toward digital transformations, IT departments are now being charged with gaining insight and control of all the devices and endpoints that apparently aren’t all coming back under the umbrella of the secure corporate LAN. This is precisely where remote monitoring and management (RMM) software comes into play, effectively freeing up IT managers and administrators for the more mission-critical and revenue-generating tasks. For these purposes, RMM includes software purpose-built for remote monitoring and management of IT assets such as servers, workstations, computers and network devices from a centralized, single screen. This distinguishes RMM from professional services automation (PSA), network performance monitoring and networkmanagement systems (NMS) platforms. While RMM solutions certainly can include some features normally associated with PSA and NMS, and those can include features normally associated with RMMs, the distinction here is in the core functionality. Similarly, if a buyer is looking primarily for a tool that simplifies the administration of mobile devices, a mobile device management (MDM) solution might be in order. The core functionality of MDM is to help make it is easier to provision, monitor and remotely wipe mobile devices, whereas RMM tools mostly are optimized for endpoints such as servers and computers rather than mobile and IoT devices, explain executives at network management company Auvik. Again, there is certainly overlap between RMM and MDM platforms, and the two actually can complement each other. In some cases, their features are combined into a unified endpoint management (UEM) platform. RMM tools generally function via a small-footprint software agent installed on the various endpoints that collects data from the individual machines and reports it back to the central management portal. It allows IT to track health metrics including CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth usage and network I/O from those endpoints across multiple locations. These metric can serve to enable threshold-based alerts, notifications and automation triggers, advised Auvik executives. If the agent detects any issues, it generates a ticket and delivers it to the administrators, who can use the management features to execute commands or resolve the issue without disrupting normal operations. Automation based on “if, then” style logic, scheduled actions and custom scripts allow administrators to reduce or eliminate the need for a human to get involved in incident response and maintenance, said Auvik. The agents can be utilized in the other direction, as well, assisting administrators in performing routine tasks such as software installation, software patching, troubleshooting and O.S. updates. With most RMM, IT staffs can create and view reports related to device metrics, software versions, Windows events, access logs, active alerts and security and By Martin Vilaboy NETWORKS 38 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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