Dynamic Device Groups & Patch Prioritization

Product Talk, episode summary

In this inaugural episode of Product Talk, Steph Rizutto and Peter Pflaster provide an overview of Automox and its cloud-native endpoint management software. The hosts discuss the Q1 product roadmap, including:

• The Policy Results History Report

• Dynamic Device Groups

• Mac OS Severity Data

They also highlight the upcoming improvements to the Endpoint Monitoring UI. The hosts emphasize the importance of customer feedback and transparency in the product development process.

Read the Product Talk transcript

Hey everybody and welcome to the inaugural episode of product talk on the Automox podcast network. My name's Peter Pflaster, and I do product marketing over here at Automox. I'll be one of your hosts. We're super excited to bring you the first episode. This will be a monthly podcast available on pretty much anywhere you listen to podcasts today. My other co-host moving forward here will be Steph. Steph, why don't you go ahead and give us a quick intro?

Hey guys, Steph Rizzuto, I'm a product manager here at Automox, and I'm super excited to be here. Awesome.

Yeah, we are really excited for our inaugural episode. We figured kind of starting out here, we would give just a really quick overview of what Automox actually is if you've stumbled upon this podcast and you don't know who we are. I'm curious how you found us, first of all, but we're happy you're here nonetheless.

So, Automox is a cloud-native endpoint management software company. Cloud-native really means we're built from the get-go in the cloud for us, it's AWS. So that means no infrastructure, no managing that infrastructure, and super easy deployment for your initial run there. We build products primarily for time-strapped IT teams so that they can effortlessly automate endpoint configuration and software updates and deployment across their enterprise for devices regardless of where they're located. So...

Product talk, the podcast. What are we gonna talk about? Well, we're gonna talk about the product. So really great name, whoever chose that. I love names that are self-explanatory. We'll cover obviously Automox, but we'll also be diving into how our customers and prospects are using the tool and the outcomes that they're generating from using the tool. So really excited to bring in this podcast and we'll go ahead and jump right in here.

So today we're gonna be covering a number of topics, the first of which is the first quarter of our product roadmap cycle in 2024. We're really excited about what we have coming this quarter. I think the first thing that I'd like to mention that we just released is a publicly available roadmap. If you're looking for more info or trying to reference back to anything after we have the discussion today, that's available if you just go to automox.com and scroll to the bottom.

There's that little menu directory. You can see the roadmap right there, and you'll be able to see everything that we talked about pretty much today. So I think as we discuss Q1 here, the first thing I want to talk about is the policy results report and what that actually does for our customers. So obviously, taking action for IT administrators is really important, but just as important, if not more important in some scenarios is actually reporting back on everything that happened, whether that's for compliance report, simple auditing, or proving what you're doing in your day-to-day work to executives. So Steph, why don't you tell us a little bit about the Policy Results History Report? Yeah, sure. Before we talk about that, I just wanna go back to the publicly facing roadmap and just kind of talk about, how you can vote on things that you like.

We use all that. So since we've released it, we've gotten some really good feedback, and it lets us know what our customers want and get some data points that we might not have otherwise. So don't forget, if you like something, vote it up, and comment on it. We definitely want to hear. But as Peter said, we're getting ready to deliver the Working on the Policy Results report. And that's a report that...

You know, we had today, and it's really good for helping you troubleshoot specific policies that fail or things like that. What it's lacking and what we're targeting here is starting to look at trends. So we're adding the history in there. Believe it's gonna have 13 months of history in the report itself.

So then you can go look and see what policies have a high failure rate. And you can start to maybe make some tweaks to your policies based on that. We're gonna give additional information and additional filtering capability. So it's a really good overhaul in the report and a really good step towards letting our users analyze the data that we have in a way that makes sense and that they can then go ahead and take action on.

So we're super excited to start working on that and get it in our customers' hands. Awesome. Yeah, the history aspect is really important. I think for most of our customers, hopefully, that's a celebration. I think the one area where I get worried about history is looking back at Facebook's history. I had a pop-up the other day of a post I made in 2010, which was back in my high school days about some baseball results. That was so embarrassing.

I would say that IT history is good, but maybe personally, I'd like a wipe after three months, I don't have to remember anything and go back and cringe at it. But yeah, hopefully, all positive history for the policy results and more of a celebration of all the work that you've been able to do or automate with Automox. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and the voting is something I actually wasn't aware of that's really cool. How...

I mean, how do you, how often are you reviewing that kind of stuff? Is that something that you review in product meetings? We're looking at it daily. So it all filters in the tool that we use product board so we can see when someone upvotes it, or when someone makes a comment on it. And you know, we have all of our features tied in there and all of the customer data that we have whenever you're talking to your CSM or anything like that. Anytime you give us feedback, we collect that.

And that helps us make our decisions and where we're gonna go and where we put more focus on. So it's just another data point for us to have that we're pretty excited about. And yeah, we look at it every day. Awesome. That's great. I think that's really important in the product development process to make sure that you're actually talking to the people that are gonna use it instead of creating stuff in a vacuum.

So the other thing that's on the public roadmap is dynamic device groups or tags. This is something I'm really excited about. I think dynamic or smart groups are really, not a brand new concept in the IT world. There are a lot of other tools out there that do that. I think the quality of the implementation and the simplicity of those managing those groups you know, varies from vendor to vendor.

I know people who have experience with some of the larger tools may, you know, break out in hives when they start to hear about dynamic device groups. But this is something that we're investigating. We're hoping to release the first iteration of this at some point this year. And it'll be kind of a continuing improvement project that we build kind of the rest of the platform around moving forward.

But, you know, really, with any modern IT environment, the legacy way of managing groups of devices, so like a device group that you would target, a patch policy or a software deployment on, it just doesn't work anymore. It's too fluid. There are devices everywhere. They have different software on them. People aren't selling their own software a lot of the time. And it's really hard to kind of manage all the policies that you need to keep your kind of endpoints in control and updated properly. So with dynamic device groups, the goal there, along with the goal of pretty much everything that we're building in Automox is to bring, a simple automation-centric approach to IT teams and managing endpoints.

So we're really excited there because, the first iteration we're looking forward to bringing, you know, grouping devices based on unique criteria instead of static groups that are targeted and you have to change manually over time. So that's one feature from my end that I'm really excited about. The other thing that we're that stuff starting to work on is actually Mac OS severity data around the vulnerabilities that are being patched. So Steph, tell us a little bit about that project. Yeah, we're really excited about this project.

It's something that hasn't been advertised yet, signed on the public-facing roadmap, and we haven't talked much about it in our customer webinars. And there's a plug, if you're interested in learning what we have coming up, we do quarterly webinars that you can look at and get a first look at what's coming out and what we're working on now. But for Mac OS severity scores, you're gonna start seeing those high critical severity data in there for Mac.

So that's going to let you leverage patch by severity policy, focus on what are the critical vulnerabilities that today you're kind of flying blind without that severity data. So it's going to help you prioritize, know, know what to tackle first. And then an added benefit is for our Rapid7 integration today. You could really only use it with Windows and Linux, some Linux distros.

So once we add the severity data, you're gonna be able to go and pull in all of your vulnerabilities for macOS-specific items and then be able to patch those with our Rapid7 integration. So we're pretty excited about that. And I think it's a really good step forward in fine-tuning our severity data and the underlying data that's kind of like powering Automox and helping you be able to prioritize what you need to focus on first.

Yeah, and I think that that's a good mention of the Rapid7 integration. I mean, really what that is doing through a tool that we call automated vulnerability remediation is taking two best-of-breed tools. So on our side, it's best-of-breed patching, and on Rapid7's side, of course, best-of-breed vulnerability management. And we're connecting those two things on the backend via API, right? To help our customers scan for and then correlate and patch those vulnerabilities automatically we also have avenues for the unpatchable stuff via worklets which are essentially, you know, scriptable units of work in PowerShell or Bash depending on if it's a Windows device or a Mac or Linux device. So yeah, that's really great. We are to continue to make improvements to that integration.

So we have some other exciting stuff coming up, like I said, really focusing on the underlying data and helping you better correlate what you're seeing in Rapid7 to Automox. Then most importantly, you can take action on it. Instead of just having a report that's, here's a ton of vulnerabilities, now you can go prioritize those, they have severity on them, and go patch and make sure that your environment is secure. That's great. Yeah.

You know, when I first joined Automox almost three years ago, at this point, I was brand new to the endpoint management world or that side of things. And my first question is like, why don't people just create a patch-all policy and just send it? I almost got chased out of town with a pitchfork for saying that. But, you know, realistically that vulnerability data is really important because you want to patch that stuff faster.

Typically you can accept a little bit more risk of a system being affected negatively by a patch that maybe didn't work ideally in exchange for covering yourself from that vulnerability, but you wouldn't wanna just patch everything every single day, because some of the stuff's just not essential to deploy right away. So that's really why people need that data and use those connections with like the Rapid7s of the world.

I think the other thing that we wanted to chat through today is kind of an overhaul of what the actual end users are, the people who are being asked to, you know, have their machines patched or configured by Automox if there's end user interaction required. And that's the endpoint kind of monitoring UI that we're working on. Tell us a little bit about that project.

Yep, so that one actually has the most votes to date. One of our publicly facing roadmap. So that one, what we're doing is you'll start to notice small incremental updates with that. We're gonna introduce a system tray that you'll be able to see updates in. And the first thing we're gonna tackle is how do we make a better reboot process for your end user. We want them to know, that we want them to be able to reboot at any time during the policy window that you set.

We want them to be able to better understand when they need to reboot. So we'll be moving to more of a deadline-based reboot and moving away from deferrals. We found through a lot of user research and talking to customers that that's confusing for the end user and that they're really excited about moving to more of a deadline-based approach. My hope is that in the end, no one can say my computer was unexpectedly rebooted and that I couldn't do it at a convenient time.

So we're really honing in on those pain points and making sure that we're tackling them in a way that's best for the end user. And that's going to give you fewer calls about my machine, unexpectedly rebooted and I lost all my work. So we're, you know, the goal is to make your end user's life easier that in the end makes you worse because you're dealing with, it just works. You don't have to think about it and they don't have to think about it.

I'm super excited about that project. And we are starting that work in Q1. Awesome. Yeah. I think a lot of the time, you know, it's like, uh, it's like on the newer cars, the automatic braking system, right? You have to create features that can save people from themselves. Almost say I've been victim to it. Even working at a company like this, where I just defer, defer. And then eventually I get the, uh, the forced reboot that was unexpected, but, um, it was only unexpected because I, I made it unexpected. Um,

So I'm guilty of that. I'm sure most IT people also are, whether or not they'll admit it, I'm not sure. But yeah, that'll be a great feature. So that's all great stuff on the Q1 front. I think the one thing about product management is it's kind of a never-ending hamster wheel of execution, evaluation, planning, and then kind of starting all over again. So as we're building in Q1 right now, we're also kind of lockstep planning for what we're gonna build in Q2.

product perspectives. So I'm curious, Steph, if you could kind of add a little bit more transparency for the folks listening on what that planning process from a roadmap perspective looks like at Automox. Sure. Each quarter, we leave room to iterate on some of the features that we've delivered so that if there are quick, fast follows that we need to do or things that we want to fix or iterate on based on feedback that we've received, we leave some space for that. So we're always looking to see what was just released. Is there anything else that we need to go back and make a little bit better for our customers?

And like we kind of talked about using the customer data from the calls you're having with the CSM, product folks, UX and figuring out what's most important and how do we stack rank that and then balance that with all the technical things that we need to do and keeping the lights on, so to speak, from an engineering perspective. So all that kind of goes in, we work really closely with UX engineering to kind of determine, hey, here's our stack rank, what can fit and what do we think is gonna solve the biggest pain points for our customers that we have today. Awesome. Well, that's great.

You know, I was obviously aware, but I think a lot of people, you know, just see the roadmap coming out and they don't totally understand where things are coming from. But I think the TLDR today for the folks listening is we're always listening, not in like a creepy NSA way, but we're always, you know, have our ears open and our ears to the ground for feedback, whether that's one-to-one customer calls or votes that we're getting on the public roadmap. Just another plug for you to go and check that out and vote on your favorite features.

So that's pretty much time today. It's lunchtime for me, so I think we're gonna call it there. Really appreciate everyone who made it to the end of the podcast. We're looking forward to bringing you this on a monthly basis coming up. And thank you, Steph, for joining us today. Thanks for having me.