Flexibility and Creativity in IT Operations with Colby Hall

Summary

In this episode of Automox Insiders, Maddie Regis interviews Colby Hall, the team lead for IT operations at Automox, about how they use their own product. Colby discusses the importance of practicing least privilege, staying informed about tech news and vulnerabilities, and keeping endpoints healthy with Automox. He also highlights the unique relationship between the IT and security teams at Automox, where they work closely together to remediate vulnerabilities. Colby shares how they use Worklets within the IT department and mentions some custom Worklets they have created. The conversation concludes with a game of 'IT Would You Rather?' and a discussion topic for the Automox community.

Episode Transcript

Maddie Regis: 

Hey everyone, this is Maddie Regis, paid media manager at Automox, and we're back with another episode of IT Insiders, which is Automox's podcast that introduces you to the people behind the product. And this month we're talking about drinking our own champagne or automoxers using automox. So we are talking with Colby Hall, who is our team lead for IT operations at Automox. So chat a little bit about his background and how he uses our product every day. Thanks so much for joining us, Colby.

Colby Hall:

Yeah, happy to be here. Well, yeah, my name is Colby as far as my background goes I've started in call center. I have done field service operations My last role I was actually focused as an MDM administrator and then when I came here about three years ago now actually started as a member of our help desk team and just kept on moving up and up through the positions and now I'm here as a team lead. So

Yeah, it's been a wild ride. Yeah, it's been pretty fun. Pretty fun experience.

Maddie Regis: 

Awesome. Love it. So I ask this to everyone on the podcast, which is if you had to give our company a name that wasn't Automox, what would it be?

Colby Hall:

I maybe it's because of the recent movie I watched, but I just watched some of the old Wallace and Gromit stuff and I love that kind of animation style and just that kind of 60s advertising era. So I think it'd be something along the lines of like Patch-o-Matic, you know, how he always does his machines as ohmatic something. And just with that, either like claymation or like in, you know, early 60s.

TV kind of ad setting would be pretty cool, like 50s, 60s.

Maddie Regis: 

I love that, yeah. We'll have to get our design team to see if we can design a Wallace and Gromit style claymation Otto. I think that would be super fun.

Colby Hall:

Yeah, yeah, he almost matches already. It's pretty close.

Maddie Regis: 

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Cool. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about drinking our own champagne. What does that mean to you at Automox?

Colby Hall:

I would say what it means to me is that we put a lot of our values and security practices to work. And a little bit of examples around that, right, is that we practice least privilege. So a lot of our accounts are separated based off of normal users and then admin users, as well as what resources or actions those accounts need to have. So obviously a normal user isn't able to go in and start changing patching settings or

Kick something off of MDM service. So there's that. There is staying in the know. So just keeping up to date with all the latest tech news, any sort of vulnerabilities or service issues that come across. We always try to stay informed. Keeping our endpoints in a healthy state with the Automox product. I think that's a really big one. And making sure that all of our devices are patched, they're all healthy. Any issues there and we go through

report on it and remediate it as soon as we can. Last but not least, and I think this is actually really important, is that internally, we actually treat our IT department as a customer of Automox. So we actually have our own customer service representative that helps us go through our account. We do monthly and quarterly evaluations.

And not only just do we completely treat it as if we were a customer, but we're also able to give feedback both to product, customer support. And actually we've helped enable quite a bit of features, troubleshooting them and implementing new stuff that everyone else can enjoy. So I think that's pretty awesome.

Maddie Regis: 

Yeah, that's super cool. I mean, it's like our product and customer team can get the most in-depth inside look at how people are using the product. So that's great.

Cool, all right, well, you know I'm gonna bring up Worklets. Obviously that's a big part of the Automox product, the Automox system. So yeah, tell me a little bit about how you all use Worklets within the IT department at Automox.

Colby Hall:

Yeah, we use a lot of the standard ones. So obviously app installations and also the evaluations part of Worklets is really, really handy when you're going through and trying to scope out certain devices. So you get a little bit of smart evaluations there. Obviously, warning on batteries, health and notifying us if there's any issues with certain devices having, you know, those batteries start.

getting a little bad. And before they start swelling up all the way, you have a little bit of notice, which is helpful since we're all remote. So really big health there. I'd say one of the lesser known ones is that we actually use Worklet to enforce security controls on Mac devices, whereas how Apple has been going and with MDM configuration profiles.

sometimes not working, sometimes the only way to do it is with a service account and  a Automox Worklet So that's actually pretty handy there. A lot of the other ones are outside of the actual Worklet catalog and we make a lot of them from scratch. So two of them that I really, really enjoy, we have one that actually goes through our fleet and evaluates it on a SysComplianceBenchmark script and then gives a...

pretty much like a rating or score via API out into a pretty much, you know, know, CSV sheet, Google Sheets, whatever you happen to use, whatever your flavor. So that's really, really handy. Second one is actually one that I made previously. So a little bit of a, you know, shameful self plug. It utilizes Automox, Automox and Google Drive. And essentially it goes through

You can either, you know, manually run it or you can run it on a schedule. It'll go into the device as long as you know the log file location. Grab the log file. Using Rapid7, it will encrypt it, decrypt it upon dropping it off, and then it'll drop it off into whatever file share or file storage service you have. For us, we use Google Drive, and then we just have a shared folder that IT can access. And that way you don't have to pester your end users for log files and go through the whole...

kind of drama and issue of them trying to go through and find it. Hey, go to var/log, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And said, you can just grab it automatically.

Maddie Regis: 

Yeah, that's super cool. It's always, I love hearing, you know, the millions of different ways that you can customize the Worklets. I feel like I learn a new one every single week. And also if you are not super familiar with Worklets, you can check out some of our previous podcast episodes to learn a little bit more about that. But I think that that gives you a pretty good insight into how flexible and creative you can be with them, which is awesome.

You mentioned Rapid7, so obviously they help us to remediate vulnerabilities. I know that's always top of mind for IT. I know security is always on you guys to make sure that you're remediating things as quickly as possible because obviously they can be exploited pretty fast. So yeah, how does that work at Automox?

Colby Hall:

I'd say we're a little different than most orgs. And what I mean by that is that IT and security are actually treated under the same umbrella. Our teams are pretty ingrained and aligned together. We share the same channels. We all work in the same platforms. So a lot of that bouncing back and forth, if you kind of imagine it kind of a little bit like ping pong, where security sees the issue, then ping pongs it over IT.

and they see what they need to do, then ping pong it back to say it's been completed. Most of the times we're the ones seeing the vulnerability first and just making remediation plans ahead of security actually coming to us and starting the work. So I'd say it's a lot better than most other works because we're able to stay adaptable. We're able to stay in the know. Being kind of coupled with security gives us that security mindset. You think like who you hang out with, right?

So I'd say that goes a long way and letting us be, you know, staying in the know, like I said, was a value previously. And also just being fast and adaptable and not really battling against security like other orgs do. Really just having that one team mindset and that we're both doing the same thing together and making infrastructure and making things are very secure and efficient.

Maddie Regis: 

Yeah, absolutely. Love the security first, obviously super important. And yeah, I'm sure it makes it a lot easier when you're meshed together instead of trying to have conflicting goals. Well, very cool. Okay, well, this has been an awesome discussion, Colby. Thank you so much. I do like to wrap up with a little game as always. So the one that I have for you is called IT Would You Rather? So I'm gonna give you a couple scenarios and you pick which one you would rather do. So...

We'll start off, would you rather store documents on a cloud service or a physical hard drive?

Colby Hall:

Definitely cloud service. Can't tell you how many times there's just been the random instant, I dropped the water on my keyboard or on my laptop. I left the USB drive at home or it's at X place. With everything just being on cloud, it's so easy just to find it, change ownership permissions if you need to say someone leaves and they happen to leave a very important document on a physical drive.

It's really, really hard to get that instead of just having something in the cloud that you can access to with IT admin permissions.

Maddie Regis: 

Absolutely, totally makes sense. Would you rather use a biometric key or an authenticator app for MFA?

Colby Hall:

I would say biometric key. It's a lot more secure. What we're finding with is that a lot of the MFA authenticator apps, you can experience what is called push fatigue, which is very notorious now. So a lot of attackers, they'll go through and they'll just keep on, if they find the credentials for somebody, they'll keep on pinging their MFA notifications on their phone. And we don't think about it so much just because, you know, we use our phones for everything.

But if you start getting 20 million pings a day for accepting and approving that MFA, eventually at some point you're either going to uninstall the thing, which you're not going to do because you'll lose your MFA factor, or you'll just cave in and press accept. So with a biometric key, a lot of that is kind of pushed out the door. It's a lot more secure. It's a better security posture for sure.

Maddie Regis: 

Okay, good to know. And last but not least, would you rather make a system-wide policy change or patch endpoints? And I'll be curious to know if this answer is maybe different because you have the Automox product, so.

Colby Hall:

I would actually probably say both. I was trying to think of it. And it's funny, there's this saying that I keep on saying all the time. There's this really old El Paso commercial where they talk about tortillas being soft and hard. And then the girl goes, "por que no los dos?" And then everyone calls out for joy. But really, you should.

Maddie Regis: 

Yeah.

Colby Hall:

really just embrace both. You need policies in order to help guide people. Sometimes they just need to know the proper way to do things and then patching endpoints is kind of the other half of it. So I'd say there are two separate entities that just both work really well together as well as they're managed properly.

Maddie Regis: 

Two sides of the same coin. Okay. Cool. I like that. I like that answer. All right. Well, I'm going to leave our listeners with a discussion topic for the Automox community, which is great if you have not checked it out. Definitely do so. But do you think that most software companies use their own software? So go ahead and drop your thoughts into the Automox community. And Colby, thank you so much for joining us. Great insights, great information. And yeah.

I'm sure we'll have you back sometime soon.

Colby Hall:

Yeah. All right, sounds good. Thanks for being here.

Maddie Regis: 

Thanks.