Oh, what a day to not be in IT

[bill_schubert]

I ran my IT shop for 12 years and tried a number of different ways to monitor and support business PCs.  One of them was Kaseya.  None of them were Solar Winds (those guys were and probably still are arrogant jerks).  

The problem with companies smaller than, say, 50 PCs is that they have the same problems as larger companies with far fewer assets.  They can't afford a network administrator or, if they do, it is a cousin who 'knows all about gaming computers.'  The only way to help them is to overlay a system from companies like Kaseya or Solar Winds or Labtec or one of a dozen others.  In order for those systems to be useful and to protect the users from themselves is to give them administrative rights to every PC, printer, router, phone and modem on the network.

There, of course, lays the problem.  We talked about this a lot in my company and worked pretty hard to update and periodically change the administrative passwords we used.  So much so that we occasionally had to scramble to figure out that password on the customer we hadn't interacted with in a couple of months.  We were better at it than any other company I saw which really made me uncomfortable for the industry.  

So we knew that one day the small IT companies would be hit and all of their customers would be attacked.  This has happened twice now and will keep on happening.  I have no idea how the small computer support companies handle this.  I'm still in contact with one or two and may ask.  But for now I'm just happy to be able to watch Wimbledon without my guts twisted in a knot.