Access IT Automation Blog

In the past 12 months, pressure to drive Digital Transformation has reached a new milestone. Alongside with growth, becoming a digital business is now one of the top priorities for CIOs. In fact, our clients and prospects are telling us that one of the biggest concerns right now is figuring out how to increase business agility and drive Digital Transformation to create a sustainable, long-term competitive advantage.

This means companies must figure out how to increase the number, scope, and variety of digital transactions while boosting their ability to react to today's fast changing customer demands. And time is ticking: 33% of organizations already claim they have reached digital scale (significantly more compared to the 17% in 2018), according to Gartner's CIO's Agenda 2019 Report.

For most developers, Java is somewhat the definition of Open Source. Although the story of Java licensing is a long and complicated one, Oracle has certainly now written a new chapter as it will now start charging all non-personal users for the usage and support of its Java SE platform. While Oracle had announced this move a few months back, there has been some updates since.

Starting on April 16th, 2019, Oracle's website informed all non-personal users and developers: "The new Oracle Technology Network License Agreement for Oracle Java SE is substantially different from prior Oracle Java licenses. The new license permits certain uses, such as personal use and development use, at no cost -- but other uses authorized under prior Oracle Java licenses may no longer be available. Please review the terms carefully before downloading and using this product."

Do you rely on a series of repetitive, tedious, and labor-intensive tasks that could easily be automated? Do you need to figure out how to free up resources to drive innovation and Digital Transformation? Are you trying to dig yourself out from under a mountain of compounding IT debt? Or are you moving to an Evergreen IT management approach to increase your organizational agility? Are you trying to figure out how to continuously update your IT landscape?

Whatever your reasons are for starting to implement a new IT automation project, there are a few questions that you should always ask ahead of time to ensure you design it as efficiently as possible — and to avoid going back repeatedly to re-engineer it and patch it up. Here are the ten questions we find the most useful to ask when implementing our IT automation solutions for our clients:

On July 9th, 2019, Microsoft's iconic device management solution, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 — officially known as Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) or affectionately referred to as SCCM within most IT departments — will be retired after 12 long years of support.

To avoid running unsupported (and therefore unsafe) versions of your device management infrastructure, Microsoft recommends a migration to the Current Branch model of SCCM as soon as possible. But there are a few things you should know before migrating.

A few years ago before Access IT Automation was founded, I had a very insightful conversation with a Head of Client Services of one of the big service integrators in my role as the CEO of Access, our IT Managed Service Provider.

This conversation stuck with me all these years because it addressed an all-too common pain point all SIs are struggling with: having "warm bums on seats" isn't a scalable business model to keep pace with the ever-accelerating velocity of IT transformation!

On the contrary, Service Integrators find themselves stuck in a situation where customers are demanding innovation to drive real IT transformation, and simply hiring more people won't cut it.

For the past years, users that have the new Windows 10 security feature, Credential Guard, enabled were experiencing issues when it blocked third-party software from accessing the user's credentials. While not well documented, the biggest issue arises when common Java applications using the JDK for GSS API are not allowed to have access to the tokens anymore and therefore block the Single Sign-On (SSO).

Before we take a closer look at the issue itself, let's go through how Credential Guard works in more detail.

When it comes to automation, there is often a big gap between expectation and reality — often in the sense of "all or nothing". For example, doomsday scenarios have been painted and purport that automation is a direct replacement for human labor and will put hundreds of millions out of a job. In reality, only about 7.4% of jobs are actually at risk for being replaced through technology, algorithms, bots, or artificial intelligence.

January 14th, 2020.

That is the date when Windows 7 goes end-of-life and a 10-year era ends — five years for Mainstream Support and five years for Extended Support. In addition, Office 2010 will lose support on October 23rd, 2020.

For years, Microsoft has been actively encouraging (some say nagging) organizations to move to its latest operating system, Windows-as-a-Service, or Windows 10. For example, the recently launched Windows 7 patch (KB4493132) even includes a reminder prompt to upgrade to Windows 10. The summary note reads: "After 10 years of servicing, January 14, 2020, is the last day Microsoft will offer security updates for computers running Windows 7 SP1."

Last year was a record year for cybersecurity breaches, malware attacks, and data leaks — and if the first few months are any indication, this year will bring on a new slew of record-breaking incidents as well.

But it isn't only the record-breaking headlines you should worry about. While massive data breaches, like last year's Target and Equifax incidents, get the most media attention, it is easy to assume that smaller businesses or organizations that haven't been targeted yet won't be under attack soon.

Productivity is often overlooked as a metric when measuring the performance of your IT team. While it may not be as measurable as other key performance indicators (KPIs), the productivity of your IT team is a significant factor in your bottom line.

There is a simple reason for that: IT teams are overwhelmed — facing several challenges concurrently, i.e.,

• Keeping up with the daily onslaught of IT tickets 
• Updating LOB software
• Hardware refresh
• Migrating to a new OS/Server
• Following a mandate from above to drive Digital Transformation and innovation

While your IT team is doing their best, they often have to get more work done with fewer hands — leaving the only option is to increase productivity. Alternatively, it's only a matter of time until you are facing anything from end user slowdowns/breakdowns to company-wide epidemics because your infrastructure is vulnerable to data breaches, malware attacks, and more.  

Regardless of what your IT team is going through, the need for increasing their productivity is high. Here are five easy ways to increase productivity today: