ERP059 - The future of the RMM

I think one of the things that people often forget is that um Intune has been around for some time um in in, you know, different stages of evolution, of course. But but Intune is not like an agent-based software, Intune's a a framework that exists on uh Windows devices. Um and they can manage other frameworks as well, so for example, Apple has their MDM framework on their Mac OS and iOS devices and Intune has become a way of managing those frameworks specifically as well. Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Luis Trado. Luis is well known in the MSP channel for his role at IT Glue, but Luis has recently moved to Solar wins. Also, lesser known fact that Luis is also an MSP owner. I'm not sure where he finds so many hours in the day, but I'm glad to have him as a return guest on the podcast. Luis was one of the very early guests of the podcast, way back on way back on episode 5. Which I'll link to in the show notes. The topic for today is MSP tools again. Luis and I are chatting about the evolution of the RMM tool for MSPs and how the pandemic is influencing network management. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast. So you get every new episode. Also, if you wouldn't mind, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app. This helps others find the show so we can reach more of the community. Now, on with the show. And welcome to the podcast, Luis. Thanks Todd, always a pleasure to hang out and get a chance to chat about everything and nothing. At the same time. That's what podcasts are for, that's right. Yeah, there was uh this thing uh this meme going floating around uh sort of at the beginning of COVID. It's like, whatever you do, don't start another podcast. Yeah, it's uh this is definitely one of the OG podcasts uh in the MSP space, I think. Um, I have you're uh a returning champion as well. Uh, had you on the podcast way back in episode 5. So we're into the the late 50s, early 60 episodes now. But uh, appreciate you coming back and uh catching up with us in the the more modern uh IT and MSP world that we're potentially in a couple years later. Always a pleasure. So, well, today we're going to talk about tools in general, uh a little specifically on the RMM, uh for those that maybe don't know. Uh, you have uh a new role, uh most people are probably familiar with you uh in your your role uh at IT Glue. And but you're now at Solar wins. Do you want to give us maybe a quick skinny on uh the new role and where you're hanging out now? Yeah, so, you know, a bit of that context was, you know, I'd built a documentation app uh back in 2013. Which was acquired by IT Glue in 2017, I spent three years there roughly, just under three years. Um, in the VP of product role as that organization sort of got built out and uh the product team. Sort of had to build out from there because um I arrived at a time when there was a couple of product functions but not really a product team so to speak. So it was an interesting opportunity there to build out a team and it was a time when IT Glue was growing very quickly. Uh and yeah, after three years, uh earlier this year in January, um uh sort of my employment there ended and I in a couple months. I started chatting with Solar wins and uh there was an interesting opportunity. To come in to drive the launch of a marketing platform um that uh that we've been trialing and piloting with some partners on the Solarwind side. This is pretty neat because the um the platform uh does sort of the campaign in a box type of thing. Uh and as you know, MSPs have been traditionally pretty terrible at the marketing thing altogether. Um it's funny, I I kind of joke around that uh most MSPs wear like a badge of honor that they've never had to do any marketing. And you know, referrals are are number one way of of getting new business, but then in the same breath, they also be like, but how do you get more leads? And so I always find that it's funny that there's like this love-hate thing with marketing and there's never any time to do it. Um and so it's a way to build a platform that was going to make it a little bit easier to get sort of low-touch marketing efforts out the door and uh relevant to the business outcomes and things that we're trying to articulate to customers. You know, being an MSP myself for the last 14 years. Help me give a little perspective to that. Um and I've since actually moved um away from that market um market tool role into something that was a little bit more specific to the RMM tools that Solarwinds has. And so I'm leading a little bit of the messaging strategy for N Central and for Solarwinds RMM. Um a lot of people actually don't know Solarwinds has two different RMM products. And so N Central, which is the more um scalable um solution that has been around a little bit longer. Uh previously from the company enable, a lot of people still know it as that. Uh and then Solarwinds RMM, which is a product that came through uh the Logic Now acquisition some years ago. And so. Yeah, working now very closely with uh with those teams on the messaging and the marketing side. My role officially is one of marketing. And so uh it's kind of funny that um I think the intent was bringing an MSP guy uh and give him a marketing role so that we can do MSP things and not the other way around, not bringing a marketing guy. You have to teach MSP things too. And so. Uh that's where we are. Yeah, and it's uh certainly of value. I see the same thing, you know, people at least are admittedly uh know that they're not great at marketing in the technical space. Uh so any any tools or uh uh augmentation that they can get from the vendors is always welcome. So I'm sure that that's a uh a useful avenue for you guys to to carry forward to the channel. So that's great. Uh on the RMM side, I I find um the the Solarwinds approach. And sort of the the more modern approach that I see there the the the group taking. Uh is really interesting is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about uh that uh we're seeing sort of a rise of some of the more um. Multi-tenant tool sets from Microsoft and uh a lot more around sort of the ecosystem management and systems management being a little more prevalent. And people keep kind of asking the questions, you know, is Microsoft uh sort of building an RMM or something to compete with the RMM? And so far Solarwinds is one of the the companies that I find has really adopted that uh change in the market. And with uh N Central in particular, utilizing Intune uh as a vehicle for accessing the tools rather than viewing it as something that's potentially competitive. Do you want to maybe expand a bit on the strategy of leveraging Intune and and Solarwinds approach on that? Sure. Yeah, I think um a little context might make sense simply to understand sort of where the genesis of this is. And um. I think one of the things that people often forget is that um Intune has been around for some time um in in, you know, different stages of evolution, of course. But but Intune is not like an agent-based software, Intune's a a framework that exists on uh Windows devices. Um and they can manage other frameworks as well, so for example, Apple has their MDM framework on their Mac OS and iOS devices. And Intune has become a way of managing those frameworks specifically as well. However, there's also the sort of very important piece which is the agent-based um actions that a lot of the RMM tools can take. And even in the Mac space, you know, you can manage a device with MDM, but you can also deploy an agent and do other things with the agent that the MDM tool is limited to. Because again, the framework is kind of decided by the vendor and so Microsoft decides what things you can manage through MDM on the Windows side. And then, you know, there might be other tools that can manage those things. But Microsoft obviously has built out Intune to be the tool of choice for managing MDM on the Windows side. And so one of the challenges that has arisen over the last uh little while is, well, you know, we still need our agent-based tools. Because there's so many things we can do with them, uh from inventory and reporting and uh management and obviously policies and things like that. That it's unrealistic to let go of the RMM agent altogether. Uh in favor of just Intune by itself. However, uh people are seeing the need to start using Intune for managing things like um compliance and or conditional access or stuff that is kind of really the meat and potatoes of the solution that Microsoft has built. And so the challenge obviously becomes, well, I need to manage all of this ideally in one place, report on all the devices in one place. And be able to manage everything centrally as much as possible. Um and so this multi-tenant uh capability was was a concern because on the Microsoft side, you had to jump into each individual customer tenant and manage things separately. Manage policies separately. Um and then back at Ignite, I think maybe a month ago or so, they announced uh Azure uh Lighthouse for Intune or for 365 and there had been some lighthouse capabilities that were launched on the Azure side. Uh so allow you to manage cloud environments, uh but the Intune piece was sort of left out of that at that time. Uh but now they announced that. However, it still doesn't really um centralize your reporting, doesn't centralize your management necessarily and so this is a great thing that uh N Central has announced is integrating directly with Intune. To the to the degree of being able to even create and manage Intune policies directly in N Central, but obviously also being able to get the visibility of those devices, reporting on those devices, um and extending, for example. The import of Intune devices directly in N Central, being able to deploy the agent to them this way and sort of simplifying a little bit of that process of centralizing. Yeah, I think that that is a really interesting perspective, I think uh the way you describe it as Intune is a framework like uh sort of an MDM approach. And and that's a that's a great way to think about it, I had not actually considered that as as a way to view it. Uh I viewed it as sort of a a a management an endpoint management tool more than than sort of a delivery framework or an MDM uh profile management. But that's I think that has a is a much more apt description of of sort of what it does. So that's great. Um also just a comment on the sort of the distinction between where the channel partner fits and the software fit is versus the Microsoft world, uh people often ask, you know, is Microsoft uh sort of going to start competing or are they going to build an RMM and things like that? And I I have largely kind of dismissed that idea. I think sure it's possible. Like they're starting to develop things that are more multi-tenant based, which is not really been a thing for them in the past. Which is great to see because it can create sort of more of these options. But I you know, Microsoft's model has always been that they build 80% of the solution and then they leave the last 20% for the partner ecosystem to build uh that last layer or that last mile of a functionality. And I don't really see that strategy changing in the in the near term. Uh so I think it is a much better way to think about it as um it's not a competitive situation. It's more, you know, how do you uh layer this on and how do you leverage it to create more value? So, you know, this morning I was watching a video from Microsoft describing sort of the some of the features and functionalities that they have rolling out in in the endpoint management. And uh things like autopilot and how how they leverage Intune for for the endpoint management. And the the way I sort of view this is everything they talk about uh every time they talk about the endpoint manager. Uh or anything that relates to what is formally SCCM is you just sort of apply RMM over top of that. Because they're often talking about an enterprise ecosystem delivery where it's one model, it's one uh company uh that they're deploying to. And in an MSP situation. It's multiple companies. And that that's where it gets really tricky to do things on those traditional tools. So just saying, you know, we have all this great ecosystem for deployment, but you still need an RMM to be able to touch all of the uh the mechanisms that you need on each of those endpoints. And have some distinction between this company versus that company, right? Yeah, I think, you know, there's also the you you you mentioned ecosystem and I think that's an important part of it as well. You know, sometimes RMM is is not just RMM, but it's also the whole platform and ecosystem that MSPs have built a service delivery model around. Uh and it kind of starts with the RMM in a way, you know, whenever you take on a new customer as an MSP. One of the first things you do is you deploy your RMM agent, you need the visibility into the assets. You need that kind of uh information before you can do more things. Um but that's only the beginning. You know, there's also your EDR tool or AV tool of choice, your backup platform and all these things are delivered through the RMM as much as possible. So, I think um, you know, Intune is one of the layers or pieces that maybe is going to play a role here. For things like I mentioned earlier, conditional access or compliance uh for security, especially as people more and more bring some of their workloads and services to the cloud. And they need to be able to secure these things based on a certain state, security state of those devices. Um and Microsoft kind of makes it a little bit of a black box in that sense. You can only use Microsoft tools to do things like conditional access potentially in certain scenarios. And so there might be some more flexibility there, but I think it'll just become another tool and as part of that ecosystem. Or platform that MSPs built for delivering service. Yeah, I think that's a great point and one of the the applications that they showed this morning in this video. directly related to that was security profile management where you could actually uh limit uh copy and paste between two separate on an application basis, right? So if you copied something from one place, the Windows wouldn't let you paste it somewhere else because there's sort of in-line DLP management that's being managed through through the endpoint directly. Which I thought was kind of cool. The other one that they showed was being able to establish sort of an invisible tunnel. So the the VPN access is is is essentially demand-based, so as soon as you open up a browser and it goes to somewhere that's supposed to be internally, it just magically creates a VPN for you and establishes that connection because it's it's aware of those things. So all of that is managed. Uh remotely by those profiles. So I think we'll start to see a lot more of that. Where, you know, there's a more tightly integrated management of the endpoint directly. Versus that traditionally coming from, you know, GPO management. Being pushed and somewhat managed by the RMM. So I I think that that'll be a great thing to see more uh tightly controlled um management of the endpoint through that. So, one of the other things that was maybe switched to is uh uh scripting has always been a major superpower of the RMM. And I think sort of more and more, especially over the last three years, uh I've been pushing people like don't build scripts in the RMM language. You're you're really sort of hamstringing yourself for for future proofing. And I suggest if you're doing any type of scripting, just build in PowerShell. And then the RMM can call that PowerShell script and do whatever it needs to do. Uh but it it kind of limits, I think the the feature and capability of the traditional RMM where if all that RMM does is give you assets, give you remote control and call PowerShell scripts. Then there's some people that are starting to question, well, what is the RMM useful for if that's all it's doing? And we've started to see some of the rise of these uh uh more nimble and upstart uh RMM or RMM and PSA combos uh in the industry. What what's your take on sort of the shift around those two things of uh things being lighter, more nimble and potentially just leveraging PowerShell scripts to get done what you need to do? Yeah, I think it's it's basically just one angle of of the whole ecosystem again, you know, we're talking a little bit about the platform that MSPs are building in order to deliver service. And uh I think part of it is the evolution you might be on uh as an MSP. You might be starting in a place where your your needs or requirements are fairly um straightforward and basic. Uh I don't I'm not calling anybody basic, I'm just saying the requirements are sometimes basic. Um and as your your organization or MSP evolves, uh and or you work with uh more complex customers or more complex situations, you either need more choice, you need more tools or you need uh deeper capabilities within the tool set. Deeper reporting, deeper analytics. Um and this is where some of those sort of single tool, single solution type of environments maybe fall short down the line. On the scripting comment, I think uh I think you're right, you know, PowerShell. Microsoft has demonstrated over and over again that they rely on PowerShell for a lot of the deeper management in in a lot of their tool sets. You know, the perfect example of this is uh how hamstrung uh the graph API is compared to the things you can do via PowerShell. There's a lot of capabilities in PowerShell that you just don't have access to with normal graph API end points. And so the challenge obviously is if you write things in PowerShell, you sort of are in the Microsoft ecosystem already. Uh but even as as an MSP where I've we've gone and done some pretty deep teams deployments, for example, or teams voice deployments, there are certain things uh even as the GUI for certain tools evolve. That are not even available in GUIs yet, so you can't do certain configurations or certain management and you have to sort of rely on the PowerShell console for some of those tools to do things like. Mass automation of assignments of phone numbers or um and this is the perfect example. We did a deployment of Teams voice for 130-person organization. And the challenge was, well, you don't want to click through each one of them to assign a phone number. Let's get this on a spreadsheet, figure out how to automate this through PowerShell and run the thing that way. And so 100%, I think PowerShell is the way to go. Uh and the tools that um offer maybe some black box and scripting language uh to do things their own way. Uh should be maybe a word of caution. I think in this sense, Solarwinds has stayed on the on the right side of history by making sure you can leverage PowerShell as is to do all your scripting and automation. Uh in the tools and and scripts and requirements that you have. Yeah. Yeah. Uh maybe a bit of history or a bit of perspective on some of the things that that you're doing as an MSP might be interesting as well. Like uh what are the some of the interesting or novel ways that you guys have leveraged your RMM? Uh I see a lot of people ask, you know, what what are the things that I could and should do with my RMM? And it's one of those questions that gets asked a lot and no one really volunteers a lot of answers. It's like everyone's just sort of waiting for someone to gift them this magical repository of RMM scripts. Uh any suggestions of of things that people should consider um on if they're they the RMM is good enough, they've got it well deployed, it's well tuned, but they're just not leveraging the power that they could potentially be pulling from it. Any suggestions there? Yeah, I certainly, you know, it's I've had some interesting conversations about this in the last couple months. Uh one of them was actually a um a webinar we did with uh Kyle Hensloven from uh Huntress. Where one of the we were trying to talk a little bit about security and aligning with CIS controls. But a little bit of the messaging and or outcome of this session was, hey, you can actually be using your RMM tool today. Right now, to do some of the alignment with CIS controls and improving security posture just generic generally speaking. Um and so I think one of the challenges of RMM is that the the reason people get into it initially is the remote control capability. That most RMM tools, you know, provide and uh and often times people don't get too deep. Uh past that requirement initially, I can do my remote control, I can deploy an application and, you know, great. You know, I've got it covered and then they're just busy fighting fires the rest of the time to get into deeper functionality of the RMM. But I'd say the security posture is a really big important conversation. Most things that are the the basis of security uh best practices, you can do with your RMM tool today. Um securing endpoints in a certain way or deploying policies or making sure that uh things that you can run with PowerShell, for example, uh on mass, a whole fleet of devices or across all your customers. You can drive a certain expected state of the machine. And so, um that webinar is interesting. Uh maybe I'll provide some links to you that you can put in the show notes because I think these things will be interesting for people to look up. And research what kind of stuff they could be doing with the RMM today. Another thing that I think Solarwinds has been really great at is there is um fantastic resource called the the cookbook. And the cookbook is a collection of uh scripts and automation policies and things like that uh that work with the Solarwinds products. And but obviously the basis of these is PowerShell. So behind the scenes, they're they're running PowerShell scripts. But um every sort of uh situation that MSPs go through, the trends, the market trends so to speak. Will drive some of the needs of these um efforts. And so for example, at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people were like, hey, how do I deploy like a VPN connection uh in a script to a to a device? Because now I have to do it on hundreds of devices potentially or at least dozens of devices per client. And there's just no way I can do this manually uh computer by computer. And so there's a ton of resources like that that are sort of driven by trends, but that over time turn into a really fantastic collection of capabilities. And tools and things you could be doing with automation instead of manually. I mean, it's funny because typically VPN access requests are very sporadic and one one by one. And so you never think, I should automate deploying a VPN profile to a Windows device or to a Mac computer. But when you have to do dozens at a time, the prospect of having to do them manually is just absolutely heartbreaking. And so this is where some of the some of the needs will drive people's uh necessity to automate and figure out how to do these things at scale. So I think that's an important piece of of RMM. Is learning how to do things at scale. Yeah, that's uh certainly. Many of the lesson, one of the many lessons that the pandemic has taught us is uh this forced acceleration and very different scenarios than what we've been been used to or exposed to in the past for sure. Uh COVID CIO, yeah. COVID CIO, yeah. COVID CIO. Um it's that's a good one as well, like um one of the things that I love, like we kind of mentioned about um um autopilot before. And and utilizing Intune. Um but the the deployment of home machines or even corporate devices that don't go to your office in the MSP. Get configured and then shipped to the the other office for the client to be deployed, like a lot of that just doesn't happen anymore. You know, slowly some organizations are returning to their office, but quite frankly, a lot of companies will continue to have a significant portion of their workforce still at home. So I see this as one of the sort of the beauties of how we do this in the future, leveraging the RMM and the tools from Microsoft. Uh to be able to deploy those new laptops in a controlled fashion. Outside of your corporate network in the end user's home and I think that that is something that people need to become very familiar with. Uh for single deployments because it makes it easier, but also mass deployments because you can't be carting stuff around and and shipping it out to the office to do those those physical installs in some cases anymore. Yeah, well, I I went against the the pandemic recommendations of not starting a podcast. And actually started a started one called Cafe Con Luis. And so you and I talked about this. But the first episode uh or first installment of Cafe Con Luis was with Matt Lee. Uh Matt Lee is just one of those great guys that has a really uh wide breadth of thought and analysis. And really can see across the the tool sets and the trends and everything else. To really design awesome solutions. And uh Matt's at Iconic IT in the US, a fairly large MSP, I think about 100, 70, 180 people or so. That was from a a group of MSPs that came together. And so he's obviously um designing strategy for a fairly large organization. But anyways, we did a a session uh about zero touch deployment. And we sort of got into this whole thing about autopilot and Intune and the ability to even use that as your basis to enroll your devices into N Central or or obviously whatever RMM you happen to be using. But it's so powerful because um at the same time that you can deploy at scale. One of the things that's interesting is how much PE or private equity is driving rapid growth in some industries and some markets, you know, and small business. As MSPs, we typically deal with with businesses that are not necessarily exposed to this. But I've met MSPs that are working in life sciences and or in finance and when there's uh a big investment that comes into one of those companies. All of a sudden, they're like hiring dozens of people per week. Or spinning up a new city or a new location. And, you know, if the MSP wants to compete and stay in that game, they have to be able to deploy very quickly. Uh and so this autopilot to Intune enrollment uh functionality is so great because uh you can have your vendors like Dell. Lenovo, HP, whomever, enroll your devices for you at at sale or even your distributors like Ingram, Tech Data, Synx, DNH, so on. Um and then those devices magically show up in your Intune console and Intune can have a policy that deploys your N Central agent and all of a sudden, without ever touching that device, you have a situation where the machine is fully enrolled, policies were deployed, uh and even at the login screen at first boot. The device can show a branded experience to the end user with the login screen that matches, uh they recognize everything. They can sign in with their Azure or or Microsoft 365 credentials. Uh and you're off to the races. And so imagine having to ship, you know, a dozen devices or several dozen devices to the shop to configure and then having to ship them back out. Just logistically, it's a nightmare. And so, yeah, absolutely, I think it's a matter of scale, uh some of these businesses are moving way faster than we've ever, you know, been experienced. Accustomed to before. Um and these kind of tools are an important part of the tool set of the stack. It was interesting in the session we did, we kind of surveyed the attendees and we had over a thousand people registered for that particular session. Um and a very low percentage of people were actually leveraging autopilot and or Intune today. Uh and obviously there's licensing costs and things like that to consider, um where typically these things have been below the line on the MSP side. You know, RMM agents are the things that are squarely inside of the platform of the MSP. And so I can see how this is a a transition that is going to happen over time. But I think what's interesting is autopilot's been around since 2017. And and yet like there's a very low percentage of people actually leveraging the tool at scale. Um so clearly a big opportunity for MSPs to get smarter about deploying and just making that process easier. Uh to get connected remotely. Yeah, I agree. I've seen the same thing, every time I bring up autopilot or have you guys tested this, have you experimented with it when people are talking about struggling with deployments, either singularly or or fleet deployments. And they're like, uh, I don't know, I think I've heard about it, but no, I haven't looked at it. So yeah, I agree that the the adoption of it is uh is woeful at this point, unfortunately. I think people uh hopefully will will start to jump on that um, you know, over the next uh year or so. Uh but that'll be a a great shift as well. The other part that you mentioned that um I don't think there's a ton of awareness around and it stands on kind of reiterating. Is that pre-deployment and leveraging your disty to accelerate that deployment by having them either deploying an image or doing the uh autopilot or Intune enrollment. Right, that that is huge. And that's another one that I find, you know, people are are often just simply unaware that that's even a possibility. So if that's not something you're doing and uh and you'd like to accelerate your deployment capability, by all means talk to your disty and ask them about pre-enrollment. Or even golden image deployment gets you further ahead so that when you can attach something, it just picks up the uh uh enrollment of the RMM and and uh starts to take off to do the rest of the deployment in an automated fashion. So that's a a huge plus as well. It's worth noting. Um Yeah, and I think the challenge. Like we mentioned earlier is that some of these things happen so piecemeal. That you never think, oh, I'm going to stop and build a process for this that, you know, over time you you sort of accumulate the time savings. Um. And so I think it it sort of becomes part of the the best practice of each MSP is like, okay, we're actually going to build this process this way for every new client we bring on. We're going to go talk to Disty and set up their their deployment process to make sure those things are are done that way. And it just takes a little bit of an attitude shift uh to make sure you're building in that kind of scalable way. Um because, you know, not everybody has honestly the time to to think about these things. And we do it a a bit on the Mac side, depending on the client. Um a larger client that is, you know, we take on that that might bring a a bunch of older machines and part of the strategy is to help them life cycle these machines out. And get into newer hardware. We realize right up front, this is like, okay, we should have the whole Apple business manager and the deployment enrollment program set up so that we can deploy very easily. Uh and not sort of be hampered by having to do one-on-one deployments and bring the machines in. And same thing with the Windows aspect. Um. Uh recently we worked with a client that was like, you know, we're potentially looking at expanding to multiple locations across the US even. So we're not going to be able to do anything there, we're going to have to be able to ship devices directly from a disty in the US to that customer site. And we're never going to be able to touch machines ahead of time. So 100%, we have to think about autopilot and Intune and all these other capabilities. So, yeah, super important. Yeah. Uh I guess one other piece on the uh work from home and the BYOD aspect of the the sort of the pandemic acceleration. Um what's your view on sort of the the the forced management of these sort of aggregate networks? Where like most of the devices are not sort of inside the corporate network and everyone's working from home. Some of them have corporate defined assets, others just are using their home PC with some levels of either VPN connection or uh some uh RDS implementation. Uh what's your view on sort of that shift of the network being uh broken up from from that centralized model? To now a very decentralized model where everything is cloud-based, a little bit is functions in the office and everything else is kind of on the periphery of the network. Yeah, I think this is where obviously a a strong layered security strategy is going to have a big role in how you think about this. Because, you know, if all your security relied on devices being behind a firewall and that's it, then this is going to put a real damper on your ability to to bring devices outside the network. But but even as applications or workloads are being moved into Azure or AWS or or Google Cloud or whatever, uh I think you see the need to secure the application. To secure the transit, to secure the conditional access. And so I think all these additional layers will get added to the whole operation uh and the better you can do that at scale. Obviously, the easier it is to protect all those end users. No matter what device they're using. Uh conditional access is interesting because you can define that a device can't access an application if, you know, at least Windows Defender is not installed on the device. And so that user using their home device trying to access a web interface, that web application can check if Defender's installed and if it's updated. And if it's not, you know, sorry, you can't access this. So at least you remove the need to put a a very um onerous agent. Or management or some other thing on the user's personal device, which they may not want, um and you sort of protect the destination service or application instead. Uh so I think those things are important to start thinking about now because I don't see any business. You know, bringing more things on prem on the, you know, on the contrary, I see more people moving more things into the cloud and or leveraging the existing file sharing that is available with um 365 or that kind of tool. So I this is a question that I had someone ask me and I was going to look for someone to bring on specifically for this podcast, but I'll maybe uh I'll I'll cut cut to you on this question because you kind of raised it. Is is someone was asking, you know, what is the use of the firewall now? Because if uh all I have is just a a single PC that is doesn't hold a lot of uh secure information, uh it's more about just securing its access to other things that are controlled in other places. So they're kind of questioning the old model of you need a firewall here, you need a firewall there, you need to deploy a firewall for them at home with some specific uh capability versus just, you know, a home router with a firewall built in is maybe good enough. What's your feeling on that is is the sort of the use and the function of the firewall being somewhat degraded based on this the shift in the network or is there still a necessary need in sort of this distributed environment for strong firewalls? Yeah, that's a good question. I I think it depends on the client, obviously, and there's going to be workloads or applications or things that you're still running on premises. Because there's just no other way to do it. And or, you know, it's potentially too costly to move an entire, you know, server environment to the cloud. Or, you know, it's or it's a heavy, you know, cluster of Citrix or or remote desktop for some, you know, very graphic intensive thing. That it's just more economical to run on premises. And in those situations, you want to make sure that people get get behind the network securely, uh and you want a firewall. Because the firewall can inspect traffic, can do IDS, IPS, that kind of stuff. To make sure that a malicious traffic is not making its way into the network. But also I feel like there's a corporate responsibility to ensure that bad traffic also doesn't get out of your network if something happens. Because this is the other piece of like, um if a machine is compromised and somebody uses it for spamming uh or as a spam bot to send messages out to the internet. Your firewall typically grabs that stuff and can lock down that device. But if you're not and you're sort of the source of uh of infection and or malware and or spam email. You know, it's kind of like we we need to build that that curtain uh for everybody. But we have clients that uh are not going to anytime soon move their workloads to the cloud just yet, you know, for cost reasons. And uh in their case, it just makes sense to have a good firewall on premises that is protecting the traffic. Something that has the capacity. Also, the other thing is. Connection speeds here in Vancouver at least, you can get a gigabit connection for 100 bucks a month. Uh and so your typical, you know, entry-level small business firewalls are not going to cut it for doing this kind of traffic at speed. Uh and sort of driving a bit of those uh connectivity requirements. And so you invest in a firewall, you get the nice speeds and you get the protection of the traffic as well. Um. And if you're hosting resources internally, you know, a website, some kind of application that people need to access. A time sheet thing, an ERP software. There's so many permutations of it. Uh then you want to make sure that uh you can lock down the traffic where it's coming from. Perfect example, one of our our architectural clients, they host a file transfer sharing application internally for working with contractors and designers and so on. Um and uh before there was a firewall that allowed the granular control over who could access it. You know, we'd see a lot of connectivity attempts from places like China and Russia and South Korea and places like that. Um and eventually they'd consume all the web sessions from trying to connect to break into the service and the service would go down. And so with a good firewall, we're actually able to do country-based uh filtering and be able to say, okay, well, realistically, we only need people connecting from the US and Canada and maybe a couple other countries. And all those kinds of problems start to go away. Uh but the visibility of a good firewall into the network and what's happening is kind of a key piece of understanding how to protect the network as well. Okay. Appreciate that. Uh anything else that you would comment on in the post-COVID world? How that is a is either accelerated things or changed the the sort of the form or function for delivery of IT? Yeah, I think obviously uh there's probably more complexity being um discovered as we uh go into a post-COVID world. Uh simply because people are um there's a combination of like Shadow IT going on. Uh you know, the traditional things that IT was managing as it was prior to the pandemic were not enough. And just people went and signed up for services and start doing things uh, you know, around the around the corner. Uh outside of the purview of IT. And so obviously IT is scrambling to try and bring that back under control. And there's the balance of convenience and security, right? And so I think a lot of MSPs need to focus on how can we deliver an efficient service to end users that is not going to hamper their ability to stay productive. Um and I think building on on that capability and making sure that they're having conversations. And not assuming that people are running everything through the the channels of IT. Is probably the biggest thing. Um. But yeah, complexity is probably increasing. Uh and I'm keen to see sort of the opportunity to help some of our own customers on the MSP side make their transition to cloud. And help with their digital transformation. And um and be more of a partner in that journey, of course. Yeah, I think that's a a really important point. That's what I see as sort of the the the future of the market right now. Is more of that consultative, more business and technology road mapping. Is really central right now because things are changing quickly and things will continue to change uh over the next, you know, one to three years. And and a good technology consultant and a good technology provider is uh assisting the the client with that road map. And that development and being progressive in how they're they're addressing the business needs and with technology solutions. Rather than it's sort of uh going by the whims of the business or being dragged around by by their requirements as well. So I think that's a big shift from just providing sort of the typical stack. Towards uh, you know, how do you actually transition towards what this thing looks like five years from now? Yeah, I also believe I think the role of IT will shift a little bit to one of like guidance and uh empowerment and facilitation. I think right now, we're probably still under the spell of of IT control a little bit. Um and I think this is maybe going to be counterproductive to how some businesses need to be unleashed, if you will, uh to be able to work freely, however, you know, the situation dictates. And so the sooner I think we realize that uh it's our job to empower and guide and uh all those things, uh the probably better off we'll be. We'll we'll be seeing more of a partner in in that situation than the person that's trying to hold everybody back by applying unnecessary control to every situation. So I I think us IT people, we love control, however, and so it's I think it'll be an interesting dynamic for us. To figure out how to manage in our own heads or in our own businesses. But uh I think it'll be an important part of it too. Yeah. I agree. All right. Uh anything else, Luis, before we wrap up? Anything you want to either a call to action. Or uh other topics I haven't addressed yet. A big metaphysical statement uh to end our our podcast interview with. Um no, no. I I appreciate, you know, getting the chance to chat about, like I said before, everything and nothing. You know, some of these things in in isolation are maybe insignificant. But uh I. The only thing I'm trying to do is trying to think a little bit more at scale. Um because even though we're the MSP at least is a small MSP. I think we'll sort of hinder our own abilities for growth or own abilities to to help customers transition. If we're not able to think like a big customer needs to think. And this is what what I've kind of picked up from Microsoft is that a lot of how they build tools is with like the massive enterprise uh in mind and everything that they build has massive scalability capabilities. And so I think that's interesting, that's fascinating to me technically. And so I'm always curious about how do we build for scale. Um. But also it's kind of the thought process I bring into Solarwinds a bit and uh we're we're trying to make sure that we're we're thinking about products and building products in a way that allows everybody from a small entry-level MSP that needs to do some basic things like remote control and some basic policies and security, all the way to the MSP that needs to automate a lot of functions and things at scale. So, uh that's what's pretty exciting. And to get to straddle both sides of that fence is I think a unique opportunity for a guy like me. And so, uh I'm pretty happy about the chance to do that. Cool. Well, we appreciate your contributions to the channel, Luis. And thanks for joining us on the podcast. Always a pleasure. Thank you, man.