Autonomous IT

Welcome to the Heroes of IT podcast, hosted by Automox’s Ashley Smith. In this podcast, Ashley interviews IT heroes ready to share their insights, successes, challenges, and stories from the field. Join us as we talk endpoint management tips and tricks, how to overcome hurdles, and celebrate IT heroes’ contributions to modern technology. 

Show Links:
Zac’s Recommendations: 
Sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/
John Hammond Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@_JohnHammond
Gerald Auger Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/geraldauger

Creators & Guests

Host
Ashley Smith
Ashley Smith isn't just the voice behind the Heroes of IT podcast, she's a beacon for customer satisfaction and engagement. With her roots deeply planted in customer marketing, Ashley brings an unparalleled passion for nurturing strong, impactful relationships. At Automox, she ensures IT heroes are equipped, supported, and celebrated. Her episodes are treasure troves of insight, packed with real-world successes and solutions to the toughest challenges in IT. Ashley has a knack for getting IT practitioners to open up, making her interviews a gold mine for anyone wanting to grasp the intricacies of IT.

What is Autonomous IT?

Go from monotonous to autonomous IT operations with this series. Hosts from Automox, the IT automation platform for modern organizations, will cover the latest IT trends; Patch Tuesday remediations; ways to save time with Worklets (pre-built scripts); reduce risk; slash complexity; and automate OS, third-party, and configuration updates on all your Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints. Automate confidence everywhere with Automox.

Ashley Smith (00:01)
Hello and welcome to the Heroes of IT podcast brought on by Automox. If you're new here, the Heroes of IT podcast follows some of Automox's IT heroes to talk about IT, endpoint management, all things automation. And this week we are focusing on the concept of maturity journeys, how to reach maturity in your IT and IT operations journey. Which is obviously

no small feat. So we have brought on our guest Zac Turner from Degreed. Welcome Zac, I'm glad to have you here today.

Zac Turner (00:39)
Glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Ashley Smith (00:42)
Why don't you give our audience a little idea of what degree does as a company and also what you do for them?

Zac Turner (00:50)
Sure. So Degreed is a learning experience platform. We have clients all over the place to use our, our software to enhance your employee learning, keep track of all those things. And I work in IT as a systems administrator here. I've been here for about five years. So yeah, I've been doing pretty much everything IT.

Ashley Smith (01:13)
Awesome, great. So let's get into it. Let's talk basics on IT and IT operations and cyber maintenance. In your opinion, what is the bare bones of what you need to get started?

Zac Turner (01:30)
Well, getting started in new IT operations and cyber, I would say definitely clear roles and responsibilities, standard operating procedures and processes, just basic security measures like firewalls, antivirus, strong password policies, things of that nature, patching obviously, monitoring data backup and just building relationships with...

colleagues, stakeholders in other departments, and also outside vendors as well. I think that's pretty much what you would need to get started, basically.

Ashley Smith (02:07)
Yeah, definitely. I think something that has opened my eyes since working at Automox, obviously we love IT we're all things IT and I think something that's unique about us as a company is the rest of our organization, sales, marketing, product, they all have such a close relationship with our IT people and the way that...

It's changed my view on security and passwords and, you know, updating my systems. It's really interesting what those little relationships can do for a company.

Zac Turner (02:42)
Yeah, definitely. And if it's a good relationship, it's a lot easier to get all the work done and make sure everyone is good to go.

Ashley Smith (02:49)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It always helps to see IT as the good guys and not the guys that want to disrupt the middle of your day by making you restart your computer.

Zac Turner (03:00)
Yeah, we definitely don't want to do that. We don't have enough time in our days. So.

Ashley Smith (03:04)
Yeah, for sure. I know that you mentioned that you've worked for Degreed for five years and that tracks you at pre-pandemic IT. I'd love to get your opinion on what has changed over the course of pre-pandemic IT to now, if that has any impacts on on-premise versus cloud software and how that's kind of formed your opinion over time.

Zac Turner (03:34)
Sure. So with where I'm at right now, our company was pretty much remote before the pandemic. They've always promoted, you know, work wherever, however, as long as you get the work done. That type of fast going work, but going from where I previously worked more like on-prem traditional IT where active directories hosted in the building or somewhere.

Um, it's, it's been a pretty big shift and I've seen a lot of different companies moving from more of that on a traditional on-premise solution to like a hybrid or cloud. And honestly, I think it's for the better. It's a lot more scalable and it's easier to troubleshoot as you know, the world has moved from, uh, the traditional, um, in office in chairs there to more spread out across the globe, like our company is, um, it's just, it's a lot more scalable in my opinion.

and I welcome it.

Ashley Smith (04:39)
So I'm going to give you a hypothetical. Say that you are starting from scratch with endpoint management. Where do you start? What do you set to accomplish in six months, in nine months, in a year? And why are you picking those goals? What makes them so important to the goal of endpoint management?

Zac Turner (05:02)
Sure. Well, starting out within six months, my goals would be to create processes, establish procedures, just get a good handle on the environment, what it looks like, what tools are out there, what people are going to be using, endpoints and equipment, like if they're using a laptop from home or if they're in an office with a desktop, things like that, routers, firewalls in offices, things of those natures, that nature.

And within a year, I would say just building off those established processes, procedures with, um, identified pain points, whether it's from things that the IT department is seeing or from users, um, putting up and complaining about things like that. Um, yeah, just building off of that to, you know, mitigate any potential threats, vulnerabilities, um, by patching, um, promoting more of that cross functional.

Ashley Smith (05:49)
Yeah.

Zac Turner (06:01)
collaboration like I was saying before with stakeholders in different departments. Aside from that, I would say probably just enhancing employees learning, whether it's outside the IT department or within, there's always something changing with technology. It's good for IT team members to stay ahead of it and be more proactive rather than reactive. Just from there, benchmarking maturity against

industry standards, making sure that you're doing everything you can to stay up to date with those standards that are always changing.

Ashley Smith (06:41)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. As to your first point of finding out what's actually living in your environment, I feel like you occasionally hear horror stories of people coming into a company and there's an entire cache of laptops that they didn't know about and, you know, random computers that haven't been turned on in a year, two years, three years, and you never know what's lurking there. It hasn't been powered up in a couple years.

Zac Turner (07:05)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And getting back to my, um, the first talking point with, uh, basics on cyber maintenance, uh, getting a good asset management policy in places. Pretty key. Because trying to go back through and figure out what's out there a year down the road is painful speaking from experience.

Ashley Smith (07:28)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I feel like that kind of lends a little bit into reporting as well and having clear reports of what's living where in your environment and who has certain third party software and who has the older Macs and things like that once you actually have visibility into, it's a game changer for how you do your workflows moving forward.

Zac Turner (07:56)
For sure. Yeah.

Ashley Smith (07:56)
in your opinion, what differentiates a space from being not very mature to extremely mature, ready to tackle, you know, big projects, ready to respond very quickly to new vulnerabilities that have come out. What are some differences that you see in those teams?

Zac Turner (08:17)
There's a few things. There's always going to be a lot of things that differentiates that, but I could say the top probably three would be strategy and alignment. Not very mature environments. There is a lack of clear alignment between IT and other stakeholders like the rest of the business and their goals.

But in a more mature environment, IT is more strategically aligned to support those goals, the business's goals. Um, and, you know, just have that base level support. I

Ashley Smith (08:56)
I know a couple of times you've mentioned bringing in those key stakeholders who are some key contacts in your opinion for people in IT to try and cultivate across their company.

Zac Turner (09:09)
Definitely product and marketing departments. Sales for sure, as you know, they talk more outside of the outside of the organization than other departments. And I would also say the engineering teams is another, probably the biggest one. Just making sure that they have what they need. As far as like agile goes, agile speed goes where they need to push out fixes really quick. Get those out there to clients.

But also just making sure that they're doing things securely rather than just pushing things out to push them out, you know.

Ashley Smith (09:46)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Are there any blogs or Reddit threads or LinkedIn pages that you follow to stay on top of things and to be in the know about fixes or new ways to do things?

Zac Turner (10:06)
Yeah, I follow a bunch of different things, but as far as like people, people specifically, I follow more of the cyber side, the security side. John Hammond is a big one. I really enjoy watching his videos where he breaks down like malware and things of that nature. Gerald Auger, he's an awesome resource that I've been, I haven't been following him for too long, but I've recently found him within last year.

and he's been great. Quite a few subreddits, but probably the biggest one is the sysadmin subreddit, because it's where a lot of us are when we live. And just different threat feeds like rapid7, and of course, Automox I follow Automox pretty closely.

Ashley Smith (10:56)
I swear I wasn't trying to get that to be a shameless plug. I talk to our community and social media manager a lot, and she's always looking for new Reddit threads. I think we also live on the sysadmin Reddit to see what's happening out in the world and to get a taste of the waters. So I'll definitely have to recommend her. Yeah, for sure. I'll definitely have to recommend her those guys that you mentioned earlier. I'm sure she'll love to take a look at their videos.

Zac Turner (10:58)
Hahaha

It's a good resource.

Bye for now.

Ashley Smith (11:25)
Awesome. Well, I think that brings us to the end of our time together. If anyone who is watching is interested in learning more about

hearing a couple more of our customer stories. You can always check out Automox.com/resources. If you're interested in hearing more about our customers and their journeys and the incredible things that they've accomplished, you can check out Automox.com/customers and you'll get to hear a lot more from them as well. Zac, thank you so much for participating today. It was great to have you.

Zac Turner (11:58)
Definitely, it was pleasure.