IT in the Education Sector with Bob Antos

Summary

In this episode, Ashley interviews Bob Antos from Trine University. They discuss his extensive experience in IT, particularly within the education sector. Bob shares insights on the challenges and opportunities in endpoint management, the importance of security, and the role of automation in maturing IT environments. The conversation highlights the need for agility in IT operations and the balance between automation and human oversight.

Transcript

Ashley: So welcome to Automox's Autonomous IT podcast. This is the Heroes of IT where we get a chance to chat with people who we consider to be our IT heroes. Today we're here with Bob Antos from Trine University. Welcome to the podcast.

Bob Antos: Thank you.

Ashley: It's really exciting to have you here today. For all of our listeners, why don't we just start off hearing about what you do and how you got into IT.

Bob Antos: My name is Bob Antos. I have been in IT for 20 plus years, as noted by the gray hair. I have been in the education sector here at Trine University for the past 10 years. I have also been in IT and manufacturing and also in small business preferences, education, or business.

But overall, small IT environments of typically what I've been in and have to wear multiple hats.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. Is there a reason for the preference for IT and education?

Bob Antos: I think it's just the interaction with the users and definitely have a wider range of challenges than kind of the manufacturing standpoint.

Ashley: Let's dive into your background with Automox. How do you use it? How did you find Automox? Obviously, you've been at your job for a while, so I'm sure you can really speak to kind of the journey with IT and endpoint management there.

Bob Antos: Yeah, primarily in the education sector, at least from our perspective here. Having the discounts that we do from Microsoft Educational Licensing. We've been afforded the ability to use. SCCM as our endpoint management for quite a long time. It's been primarily my experience.

But I've also realized some of the pitfalls and some of the challenges with going through and dealing with that platform. Automox is actually fairly new here at Trine University. I have pushed to go through and bring something like Automox, specifically Automox, for close to five years. And we just recently implemented here this past May.

Ashley: Was there a deciding factor that really led the push one way or the other?

Bob Antos: I think just overall and in some regards with a university such as in our size, sometimes it is certainly budget constraints as far as new platforms that we can go through and bring in. Some of it is just really a matter of prioritization as far as what the IT needs are of the whole university.

So that plays a big part. It wasn't anything specific to Automox as far as the challenge as to why it took us so long. I've had other platforms that have took similar time frames to go through and bring to fruition.

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. think in education and in public sector, it's kind of the name of the game is kind of getting to know software over a long period of time and getting to know the team. And I think that's also kind of cool. Like I'm sure that Automox has changed a lot since when you first looked at us five years ago to where we are today.

Bob Antos: certainly. Certainly.

Ashley: So for those of you who are listening who may not know, every month Automox has a little bit of a different theme that we like to take for our podcasts and this month we're talking about maturity and advanced automation and how to mature your environment. Bob, I think you can obviously speak really well to this. In your own organization, what are some initiatives that you've taken to mature your own environment over the years?

Bob Antos: Well, as a group, we have gone through and obviously it's not necessarily just about patching a system. It is going through and having the agility to make changes quickly. That's definitely one of the advantages we saw from an Automox standpoint. security is definitely something on our mind, something from top down has been something that we've needed to focus on. We've utilized third party security assessments. We do those yearly. Those have greatly helped us identify and point out kind of melding the security and endpoint management in one of the one of the reasons why we are looking for something different from previous platform and moving to Automox.

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah. I know that there are a lot of people out there, especially in recent years, who think that maturing, and maturing patch management and maturing your IT environment might need to revolve around automation or the use of AI tools. Do you necessarily agree with that? Or is there another way that you look at advanced IT environments?

Bob Antos: Well, I think it's it is a combination. It's a hybrid, I believe, as I mentioned earlier, just being in small environments my entire career and having to wear multiple hats, having to multitask, you know, not only between projects and but day to day fires. You know, some of those revolve around zero day vulnerabilities and having to mitigate those as quickly as possible and being on small staff, having to have a platform or have the tool set to make those things happen quickly is just paramount.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. think that it's probably very fair to say some of the most advanced environments are the ones that can move fast and move quickly when needed.

Okay, well, Automox has a maturity assessment that we like to put out every year. We include a couple of questions on it for, you know, those who are looking to kind of gauge how mature their endpoint management is. And so I wanted to do a couple of quick questions from the quiz and get your opinions on them. So in your opinion, what endpoint management metric is the most important to you when you're looking at reporting?

Bob Antos: Seemingly over the past couple years it has been security and vulnerability. More so in the server environment, you know, and those hosted platforms in conjunction with the end users as well. More so some of the those users that are dealing with PII more frequently definitely we have to focus and make sure that those their endpoints are secure from that standpoint.

Ashley: Yeah. When you're looking at that, are you weighting more on how many numbers of vulnerabilities you have or are you looking at time to remediate?

Bob Antos: No, think typically when we're in a transition phase here yet, getting out of summer projects and really ramping up on Automox. Previously, we were on a monthly schedule to go through and mitigate vulnerabilities. Automox is going to give us more of a flexibility to do some of those items sooner.

We're still trying to determine on what that overall process looks like. But yeah, I think that is primarily what we're looking to do and to try to make sure that we can hit some of those faster and probably with more accuracy.

Ashley: So moving on to the next question in the quiz, how many tools should you use to manage your IT environment? I think this one's kind of interesting because there are people out there who love to have a tool for every single thing. And I know some people, they only like to log on to like one or two.

Bob Antos: Yeah, I think the challenge in going through and having too few is maybe running into the cliche of having all your eggs in one basket. know, having some cross platform access to some of those tools being available in multiple platforms potentially, kind of a cross -reference to each other.

But when you're talking about endpoint management, patching security, like within our environment, going through and utilizing third party vulnerability scans, going through and giving us that reporting, we're looking at some possibility of integration with Rapid7 into Automox to maybe help that go quicker for us. But I think some of those things still need to be separated.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. I think also some of it's a little bit of what is your budget look like? Can you afford to have multiple tools in your environment? Do you have to look at one that maybe does it all but doesn't do it as well? Those are also some considerations. How valuable is the cloud to you?

Bob Antos: Used to be less so, more so because we could avoid some security issues with less items or less resources in the cloud. as our university has grown over the past several years, we've had more personnel that have been moved off campus.

And so it's become more of a need to mitigate and manage those endpoints outside of VPN connectivity. And so there again, that was another reason for us to move to something along the lines of Automox.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. think 2020 specifically and COVID and remote work, it signaled a big shift for a lot of people, think, especially in the education sector. At least people that I've been able to speak to. That was like a resounding reason to really start to look at not just Automox, but other tools that utilize the cloud as well.

Okay, and our last question, how much should be automated in your day-to-day tasks?

Bob Antos: Well, it's there again, I think it's there's a fine balance between what you constantly want to keep the pair of eyes on versus what you can automate. There again, in our situation with a small staff, we use third party services to go through and help deal with reporting, assessing vulnerabilities at a high level that we can get reporting on, that we can take action on on some of those higher level items, just to allow some filtering to take place. yeah, I think automation is good to help free up staff to deal with other projects.

It's all a matter of what you want to put your eyes on and what you want your priorities to be and what the environment or from top down or what their priorities are.

Ashley: Yeah. And I think that's also a really accessible way to think about automation and that doesn't necessarily have to replace anyone's job or do extensive coding or endpoint management or patching, but helping it more so organize your day, organize your tasks, do the lower level admin things. I've heard a lot of people use automation for like help desks and stuff like that. And just those little things can free up a lot of time in someone's day.

Well, that brings me to the end of my questions, but thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was a great conversation and I think a lot of people, especially in the higher education space, will definitely find it really useful and really helpful.

For those of you who are listening and you'd like to hear more, you can find the Autonomous IT podcast wherever you listen to your podcast. So YouTube, Spotify, Apple, where we drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. We do this across our team, across different topics. So we have CISO IT, Patch Tuesday, Product Talk, and a lot more. So thank you so much, Bob. This was awesome.

Bob Antos: Thanks, Ashley.