Cross-Team Success with John Jakubowski

Ashley: Welcome to Automox's Autonomous IT podcast. Right now you're listening or watching the Heroes of IT where we get to speak to people who we think are IT heroes. Today we have on the call John and thank you so much for joining us.

John Jakubowski: it's good to be here.

Ashley: Why don't we start a little bit with your background and how you got into IT?

John Jakubowski: Well, I'm not sure this podcast is long enough. So I've been in IT for about 47 years now in various roles. been, I'm an IT manager for a communications company. And, you know, as is the case with a lot of companies these days, you know, acquisitions and sales and acquisitions and sales. So I'm actually working for the same company that I have for the last 40 years or so, but it's changed names like six times. But yeah, so along the way, you know, for the most part, we built staff. But the last acquisition, we went from a staff of over 30 IT professionals to four. So that changed our landscape quite a bit with regards to free time and just time to do stuff and patching was one of

Ashley: Yeah, I'm sure. So what were you guys using to patch prior to that acquisition or what was your patching landscape like?

John Jakubowski: So this company was using WSUS and they trusted that the platform was working. Again, they had a staff of two when I came on board and brought some money with me. So we doubled their staff in the acquisition, but they just didn't have time. They trusted that.

Everything was working the way it should be. didn't monitor, they didn't have tools to do any monitoring. They just built the server and trusted everything was okay. Everything seemed fine. They are machines, they expected that the other 100 or so were also in the same shape, and that just wasn't the case.

Ashley: Yeah, I think it's difficult when you're a small team working for a large company, but I think there's also an element of trust that you touched on where you want to trust that your tools are doing what they say they're doing and everything's patched and the reports are reflecting that and it's, a difficult position to be in for sure.

John Jakubowski: Yeah, there were PCs in this company and some servers that weren't patched for over a year when I came on board. I had heard of Automox in the past. I think I did a trial with a previous company and they just decided they would just build up, just add some additional resources to their Microsoft platform to monitor and keep track of those things that were coming in. It was just Microsoft though. They didn't do any third party patching unless it was a program that said, hey, there's an update available and sometimes the end user would click that update and sometime they would just say ignore. So I think we're in much better shape now. It took us three days. 

So we had machines that hadn't been patched in over a year. after three days of our trial, we were over 75% compliant with patching. So that just says a lot for how quickly you can ramp up and get the product going. And it's just been building. We've just been building policy and expanding our implementation from.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a really quick roll out. I mean, I have heard, you know, people do it super slowly and people who are able to kind of get everything uploaded on day one, but I think that's a really impressive number. And also, I mean, I'm sure when you're talking to people across the company, that's reflected with that number.

John Jakubowski: Yeah, management, they wanted to know where their money was going, right? I mean, they wanted to know why we had to pay all of a sudden now for a tool to do what they thought was happening already. once we explained and showed them what it was in doing and the situation they were in, the vulnerabilities that were unpatched and untouched, it got their attention pretty quick.

This company has had a cyber attack in the past. you know, so again, management was very responsive and got us what we needed to get the tool.

Ashley: awesome when they're actually like receptive to what you guys are going through and what you're having to handle and understanding like okay we need to make the transition to paying for you know a more expensive tool or we need to shift what we're doing we need to consolidate XYZ we need to upgrade I feel like that's always a really difficult conversation to have with people.

John Jakubowski: Yeah, I mean with Automox we get to use the staff for things that we need a person for. And when you're small and you have a small team, that's really important.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. Have you guys used the Worklet team before?

John Jakubowski: yes.

Ashley: That's a good one. For those of you who are listening and you might not know what a Worklet is or what our Worklet team does, Worklets are pieces of bash or PowerShell script, and they can help you automate at scale. upgrade all of your macOS devices or upgrade Zoom, it's probably the most commonly used one. And we have a team that will help customize and build those scripts for you if you're not really skilled in scripting you have other things to do or you know it's a really difficult piece of code for whatever reason they like to pitch in where they can.

John Jakubowski: there's just a ton of scripts and policies that are available out of the box, a lot more than there were when we initially implemented. yeah, that was, most of what you need is already there and I'm pretty adept at scripting. we built some to, once we got our hands wet and got into it, we felt more comfortable, know, testing and getting things rolled out some fun.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. Love to hear that. Okay, well this month, all of our Autonomous IT podcasts are discussing security and IT and kind of how they play together. Could you talk about how your team handles the topic of security and how you work with your security team?

John Jakubowski: I am the security team. Yes, yes, yeah, we're a hand in hand. Well, yeah, not a land, but you know, our entire team, you we share that responsibility and, you know, Automox plays a crucial role in that process. we've got a multi-pronged approach to security.

Ashley: Okay, so you work very closely with them is what I'm hearing.

John Jakubowski: and use multiple vendors to monitor our landscape and keep us safe. Along that way, Automox deploys the agents, make sure that they're installed on the equipment. We use group policy to push Automox down to the equipment. So when a machine is joined to our domain, Automox automatically gets installed. If somebody decides they're going to uninstall Automox, Group Policy will put it right back again. And then Automox takes care of deploying all the rest of the software that's required, that's not in the original images that we deployed to the workstation. So we use groups definitions in Automox and then use those to target devices to get software installed. Security software and those agents is a big piece.

Ashley: Yeah. For the people that are listening that may not already have Automox in their environment, can you expand a little bit more on what a group is and how you use groups?

John Jakubowski: So, you know, there's lots of ways that you can define your environment. We currently have three sites. So we have site one workstations, site one servers. We have remote workstations in a separate group because those aren't always online at the same times as some of other devices are and so we can target the rollout. We're all in the same time zone. So if we weren't though, that would help to push software updates out to equipment based on that time zone. But it lets us keep track of and deploy patches by site so that we don't inundate the network with a lot of traffic all at the same time for several hundred workstations and servers. So we have special attention servers that we can't take down and reboot every day. So those are in a separate group. And yeah, it just works for us.

Ashley: We love hearing that. just works. Okay, so moving on to my next question. Here at Automox, we like to think that the best security is keeping your environment updated. I know there are a lot of people out there who have different response times to updates and try and manage their vulnerabilities that way. What is your take on that and how do you put it into practice?

John Jakubowski: So we follow Automox's best practice, and that's changed since we initially deployed. So I'd have to say to anybody that's using AutoMox, if you've been using it for a while, go through those training videos. I had to have some surgery on my foot, and I had a weekend that I couldn't do anything, couldn't be up and around as I usually am. And I went through the training videos and I learned a lot. I thought I was an expert at Automox and learned a lot from Automox University and learned that best practice had actually changed. I changed our policies a little bit, tweaked them a little bit to better adhere to what you guys recommended for best practice.

Automox is continuing to get to be a better product. Yeah, it used to have programs like Citrix Workstation that had to be shut down. And we had policy that would execute 10 minutes before another policy would execute to update it. Now Automox just takes care of that. It knows that it needs to be shut down before it's patched. yeah, you guys are coming along.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. Shout out to our product team. Their vision I think for the product is something that's really awesome and it's really been a driving force this past year, year and a half. They've done a lot and for those of you listening who heard Automox University and your ears popped up, Automox University is a free training resource that we provide for all of our customers and you're able to go on and take self -guided courses and the Automox University team is also constantly updating those, putting out new classes to take, and they do a really lovely job. So that's great to hear that people are taking them and taking them without, you know, just on a weekend for your free time.

John Jakubowski: It was unexpected free time, but yeah, was free time. I gotta say that, you know, unlike a lot of software vendors these days that are just huge and say they listen to their end users, you guys do. You really do pay attention to the questions that folks have. You listen to the comments that are made.

Ashley: Very true.

John Jakubowski: you know, during some of your webinars and those things get implemented. And it's nice to see that, yeah, you care. I mean, you don't see that a lot today. You really don't.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. I've been at Automox for about two years now, two years in October. And so it'll be two years once this podcast airs. And I think that's been one of the things that impresses me most, like our customer feedback channel, or I'll hop out with webinars sometimes. And afterwards, like that list of questions that people are putting in chat, like it's getting sent to someone and you're getting email responses on them. Like they're live people on the other end of the screen, which, know, when you're talking to a vendor and working in a remote environment, I think it makes a really big difference with culture.

John Jakubowski: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that is somewhat recent, maybe it's about a little over a year now, is that you've been pulling out of remote control. know, Automox learned from folks like us that, we're using your tool to patch the workstations, but, you know, if there's a problem with that workstation, we have to use another tool to remote into it. And it's like, that really makes sense? And you guys built it into the product.

And so it's, you I'm not going to use that glass phrase, single pane of glass. Everybody likes to say that these days, but it really is. mean, it's one place to go to support all of your devices.

Ashley: I think we did have remote control when I originally onboarded, but it's changed a lot and the functionality of it has gotten a lot better.

John Jakubowski: Yes.

Ashley: that goes for like a lot of our offerings. It's not just how much can we add, but it's what is working that we have in our product and how can we tweak it to make it better? I think like reporting is another one that comes to mind that's changed and updated a lot for the better since my time here.

John Jakubowski: Yeah, it really is a lot easier today to understand what the landscape looks like and what's been missed and what you have to pay attention to.

Ashley: Got that. Well, I think that brings us to the end of my list of questions. This was a great conversation, John. Thank you so much for joining.

John Jakubowski: Well, my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Ashley: For those of you who are listening, this is again, the Autonomous IT podcast. The segment is called Our Heroes of IT. You can find the Autonomous IT podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. So Apple, YouTube, Spotify, and we put out episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Thank you.

John Jakubowski: Thank you.