On June 25, 1876, General George Custer rode toward Little Bighorn. His mission – to subdue members of the Cheyenne and Lakota tribes and force them onto reservations. In the days preceding that one, Custer made a few poor choices. Before he arrived at Little Bighorn, Custer had divided his force of 625 men into three roughly equal contingents, a tactical move that many have criticized (1). When his Native American scouts tried to warn him of the large number of warriors camped at Little Bighorn, Custer doubted them and insisted on pressing an attack before the other two contingents of his men arrived (2).
After Custer and his 210 men began the attack, he discovered that his scouts had told the truth. Instead of a hundred and fifty braves, Custer’s men were met by over 2,000. History buffs know that the battle did not go well for the 7th Calvary. None of Custer’s 210 men survived. Even though Custer had other military accomplishments, he is now remembered for his epic failure at Little Bighorn.
Historians still debate which of Custer’s errors truly led to the deaths of his men. Some blame his arrogance. Others blame his tactical mistakes: choosing not to bring the Gatling guns, neglecting to take the extra troops, dividing his force into thirds, ignoring his scouts and pressing an attack too soon.
The truth is that lack of knowledge of his environment killed him. General Custer didn’t know what he didn’t know.
IT Network Discovery and Management Best Practices
As an IT professional managing a large network, you can’t afford not to know. You need reliable, timely information about all the assets you manage. Yet, for many IT pros, gathering that intelligence requires looking in many separate network discovery and IT management systems.
American Association of Community College’s CTO Jonathan Nelson and Kaseya’s Ray Barber recently discussed 5 Best Practices for Network Discovery and Management for 2013 in a webinar.
Enlivened by Jonathan’s real world examples, their discussion covers IT network discovery and management best practices for:
- Discovering the current state and health of your IT infrastructure
- Managing through a single platform
- Automating, monitoring and remediation of issues before they impact business operations
- Deploying software, security, settings to all machines across all sites without interrupting users or disrupting work flow
- Validating performance in a way that can be demonstrated to the business
The first of these is best practices is discovery. It’s crucial because you can’t manage what you don’t know about.
Are you able to quickly and easily get a picture of every piece of your network through a single familiar interface? Do you feel confident that your IT network discovery process gives you an accurate picture of your network environment in real-time? Does getting that picture require many systems, passwords and logins or just one?
Kaseya 6.3’s Discovery Module is a single place to find everything you need to know. Consider it (and the network discovery best practices) an easy way to ensure that nothing in your network environment catches you by surprise. Catch the full webinar here!
Sources:
(1) “George Custer.” 2013. The Biography Channel Website. Mar 15 2013.
(2) “This Day in History: June 25, 1876.” The History Channel Website. 15 Mar 2013.
