With a greater number of organisations adopting cloud services each year, IT resellers must face the challenge of keeping themselves relevant and core to the value chain.

Services like Microsoft’s Office 365, Google Apps and Amazon AWS offer real alternatives to in-house server installations and while availability and security concerns continue to exist there can be no doubt that the direction has been set and there will be no turning back.

IT resellers are going to have to adjust their value proposition to cater for cloud services or they risk positioning themselves as competitors rather than enablers.

Eighteen months ago it was still reasonable to hold the view that cloud services would form only a percentage of the IT services deployed by companies. That view is no longer valid, and the biggest driver has been the unstoppable penetration of mobile devices into every level of business.

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by James Fletcher l August 30, 2011 l No Comments »

This week, CTO Ian van Reenen gave a great overview of the new features within CentraStage v4.2 released last weekend. If you missed it you can view the recording here. Here is what Ian also had to say about Patch Management from CentraStage:

Keeping windows up to date with the latest hotfixes and service packs is relatively easy if you turn on automatic Windows Updates and are happy to follow Microsoft’s release schedule. CentraStage policies make it really easy to enforce this and throw in some extra reboot options as well. But what happens if you require greater control over what machines get which patches? CentraStage 4.2 includes a brand new patch management system that gives you complete control of when patches go out and to which computers. You can even recall patches if needed, and report on missing patches across all your devices.

The 2 minute “way it works”is as follows: Using CentraStage policies you can control the Windows Update settings on each device targeting operating systems or groups. This works really well if you don’t need more granular control. During every audit the agent also reports in any patches that have been released by Microsoft (or the configured WSUS server) but are not installed. Clearly if updates are set to automatic then this list will always tend to zero.

If you need more control though you can now set the Windows Update policy to “Do not use automatic updates”. Now your list of missing patches will grow as patches are released but not installed. You can view this list at the device, profile and system levels. At each level you can choose to approve or rollback a specific patch. These changes will be enforced at the next patch window set in your policy, giving you complete control of which patches are to be installed or removed. We are going to add a couple further features such as emergency patch deployment a little later on but hopefully you will find this new feature really useful and easy to implement. Be sure to let us know what you think on our forum.

by James Fletcher l August 12, 2011 l No Comments »