We can do that already.
No. No, you can’t.
A famous aphorism states that “There’s nothing new under the sun” – with the rate of change in today’s technology environment, I think we have to reassess the truth of this “truism”.
I’ve heard serious technologists say of Tachyon “We can do all of that today in our current tooling, we just need to write more SCCM extensions and PowerShell scripts to do it”.
Erm.
No.
“We already do it today, there’s no way to improve it” is, in my opinion, the cry of a Luddite, not a Technologist.
Don’t get me wrong, PowerShell, SCCM, BigFix, etc. are all great. They have real value to add to companies who use them for the correct purposes. Take SCCM, it’s great for enabling large-scale OS Migrations (especially when teamed with 1E’s WSS tooling), business as usual patching, software deployment – all areas SCCM was designed for.
SCCM is not great at dynamically gathering live system data in real time. It wasn’t designed for that. It’s not that it can’t provide you with snapshots of information, it can… but it’s not a dynamic, real-time tool.
I can communicate by post, or by phone or with Skype. They are all valid communication methods. But if I’m on vacation and I read in a newspaper that there’s a forest fire in the area I live in, I’m not going to write my neighbor a letter to ask if my house is in danger – it isn’t 1874… I have other methods of communication which are real time that I’d prefer to use (landline, mobile phone, video conference, take your pick).
So too with Tachyon – if you want some data immediately, that’s the go-to tool for the job.
Just as each development in the world of telecommunications changed our view of what is possible (for example, deaf people communicating using sign language via video call would have seemed like science fiction in 1985) Tachyon enables new functionality, the speed at which it provides data makes things possible that just were not previously possible with existing tools like SCCM, PowerShell, BigFix, etc.
For example, if you want to:
- Understand if any device is connected to a specific external IP Address, right now
- List which devices have had connections to a specific external IP address over the past X days
- List which machines are running a specific process, right now
- List which machines have run a specific process over time
- Search live for files with a specific name/hash/extension/etc.
These types of data are typically not available, at speed and scale inside an enterprise environment today. You can query 1 machines (at the keyboard or via RDP) to find out almost anything, right now… but to query ALL machines and find out/do almost anything… that’s impressive.
Tools that run PowerShell or whatever to gather data across a large number of machines normally send out a script (which can take hours or days in a large environment), run the script (which may or may not work based on a multitude of variables) and return the data (which takes more hours or days in large environments).
Tachyon can do all of these things in seconds.
We are left with 2 questions:
- What is now possible that was not possible before
- What is the value of “speed”
For #1 above… what is possible, at scale, in real-time, is now effectively limited only by your imagination. They say necessity is the mother of invention – Tachyon customers have turned to Tachyon to find out:
- What machines had BitLocker enabled and in use
- Which users were actively using OneDrive for Business and which were not
- What Cloud/SaaS applications were being used by which users and how often
- Which devices were ready to upgrade to Windows 10, which were incompatible, which required a wipe and load (and why)
- What application crash events had happened in the environment
- How quickly have patches been deployed across Windows devices
These are just examples of the sorts of things Tachyon users have done. By combining instructions relating to hardware, software, processes, network connections, users, and files – the possibilities are effectively endless.
And it’s not just about what’s possible, it’s about how easy and user-friendly the process of getting the information is. Check out The Tachyon Exchange for information on the latest product packs from 1E – most of them are created in response to customer requests.
For #2, if you want to know the value of speed… well, a tongue in cheek response might ask about how IT Operations and IT Security in your organization dealt with WannaCry 2.0 when that hit… Tachyon customers knew in seconds if they were exposed, which machines needed to be patched, have SMB v1.0 disabled and/or be rebooted. Many enterprises worked through the weekend and still didn’t have the answers on Monday to simple questions like “How many machines are open to infection?”.
A more serious response would argue that as all companies become more “Digital”, the need for responsive IT Operations and seamless IT Security has never been more demanding. The value of more rapid response to issues which are business impacting is difficult to quantify, but impossible to ignore.
Do more, go faster, choose Tachyon.
