Why can't I do all these scans? Effective Scanning Practices

 by: Brian C Teasley

With the IT space becoming more proactive than reactive, scans are on the rise.  And with more scans means more performance issues during scans.  This means that a smart placement of your scanning is crucial to ensuring a productive end user environment.

It's time to ask yourself a simple question. When should I be running scans?

Running scans during off hours is key to insure minimal end user interruptions, but what about machines that are shut off every night? Devices that are inconsistently available such as laptops? This is where the problem becomes more complicated.

We will be looking at the following products.

Patch Management

Managed Antivirus - Bitdefender

Risk Intelligence

Let's look at the different scans and how we can accomplish this.

Smart money is on the little guy!

Written by David Ianetta

Who has not heard of Bruce Lee? His name is synonymous with being a man you would not want to mess with.

There are Chuck Norris jokes, but why aren’t there any Bruce Lee jokes?

Bruce Lee and  Kareem Abdul Jabbar - "Enter the Dragon"

Because Bruce Lee is no joke!

If you are just starting out as an MSP, you might feel a bit intimidated by all the bigger companies that are out there. You might feel like you don’t have the same resources, so you cannot get the same results. 

But just as with martial arts, the right RMM solution can give you the tools to compete with others that may be better staffed than you. Tools to excel beyond what you first thought capable. 

RM Patch Management: Medicine for the common IT cold.

By: Brian C. Teasley

Patches.  Just the word itself is enough to make any IT staff cringe. Keeping workstations and servers patched can be a very frustrating experience. The list of devices to manage and update goes on. This is where Patch Management comes in. A cloud based solution to keep all your machines running smoothly and up to date, regardless of the device type. 

Layered security: High-speed internet changed everything

Back in my day a good AV product was all you needed to protect a network. Patches were mostly bug fixes, and the internet was relatively safe.

High Speed Internet changed everything. Back in the days of dial up, the bandwidth did not exist to provide a cyber-criminal with decent access to your network. The connection wasn’t 24/7 either. Users connected to the internet, did what was needed, and logged off so someone could use the phone line to make a call.

By David Ianetta

Mix and match

By David Ianetta

We can have a tendency to look at the RM dashboard as providing us with a number of different services. Therefore it is easy to compartmentalize these services and isolate their functions.

However like any good tool box, RM provides us with tools that can be used in an endless number of combinations to get our job done.

Change the settings for Automatic Updates

Microsoft did a wonderful service for "regular people" to get their operating system updated with very little fuss.  The original Windows Update web site, with a shortcut icon on the Start menu was great.  Over the years it grew ...

Work Smarter, Not Harder - Patching Shortcuts

Deploying patches to multiple machines on a per machine basis is cumbersome.  Scheduling reboots one machine at a time takes too long.  Within GFI MAX there is no need to perform maintenance one device at a time.  With keyboard shortcuts you can take three hours of work and do it in a fraction of the time!

Patch Management work cycle

So, GFIMAX does patch management for every software known to man(1) and it does it right in the same interface you work in day in, day out.

But just what do those gremlins in there actually do??  How does the Site Concentrator get so smart and download everything needed for every machine?

Wizardry and magic!

(T3): Managing your Patch Management

Deploying patches successfully and efficiently across multiple clients can quickly turn from a simple maintenance task to a huge time-suck if you don't have a plan, flexibility, or the  right tools.

(T3): Patch Management & Dashboard v5.21

Yes, y'all - it's finally upon us!  Dashboard v5.21!  Here's some cool stuff you can do with the new dashboard and the new Release Candidate Agent (v8.10.1).  In essence, now patches from both Microsoft and all of our supported vendors can be approved and installed, including reboots, without user intervention if desired.

If you'd like, you can read the release notes on the forums:
http://forums.gfi.com/Dashboard-v521-and-Agent-v8101-RC-m900804700.aspx