Azure: In the Clouds With VSA

When businesses rush to spend money on tools to manage and optimize their cloud infrastructure, they end up with roadblocks like limited visibility, tool sprawl and poor integration, which is counterproductive for automation. Hybrid and multicloud IT setups increase the complexities substantially.

To manage your IT environment securely, efficiently and economically, you need to provide your technicians with an advanced remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution that will replace multiple point tools and provide complete visibility into your hybrid IT infrastructure.

VSA is the most powerful RMM tool in the market to help your technicians discover existing and new devices on your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform and push agents to virtual machines (VM) with a single click. The advantages to Azure Active Directory (AD) users are even more significant. Using VSA, technicians can remotely control and deploy policy-based user access privileges to enforce security policies across on-premises devices and VMs.

Why should you care about the cloud?

Cloud infrastructure management involves monitoring cloud-based virtual machines, SQL instances and cloud services, troubleshooting issues, managing cloud usage and costs, and optimizing the cloud for higher efficiency. The pandemic precipitated an acceleration in cloud adoption with many small businesses aggressively moving to cloud infrastructure services such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a public cloud computing platform formally released by the tech giant in 2010. It provides a range of cloud computing services and supports several programming languages to help users test, build, deploy and manage cloud services and applications. Azure Active Directory (AD) gives users access to a host of external apps like Microsoft 365, Azure portal and several SaaS applications, plus internal resources developed by the company.

In an organization, users need access to information and tools to complete their work. However, giving everyone indiscriminate access strains the infrastructure and poses security risks. An active directory is a database of users and devices connected to a network and helps IT admins control access privileges for user and device groups.

How can VSA help with cloud infrastructure management?

VSA automates the process of discovery of all endpoints and network devices, including virtual hosts, VMs and cloud infrastructure for services such as Microsoft Azure.

Discover the following Azure cloud resources using VSA

  • Virtual machines: These are the scalable computing resources that cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides.
  • SQL instances: Discovery and mapping of SQL databases.
  • Cloud services/app services: The Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs and mobile backends, to name a few.
  • Load balancers: These allow you to scale application resources, enabling you to provide high service availability.
  • Azure resource groups: Azure resource groups are containers that hold resources related to a solution.

Discover Azure active directory database

  • Users: It is the user profile entity within AD that can be included in VSA, as per policy, to allow direct logins and management functions such as disabling accounts or resetting passwords.
  • Computers: Discover all computers connected to an organization’s network to deploy policies en masse.
  • Domains: Domains are groups of computers, users or organizational structures that adhere to a specific administrative system. IT administrators can easily apply a uniform set of guidelines to all devices and users in a domain.
  • Groups and OUs: Groups and organizational units help IT administrators apply a set of policies to a subset of users or computers in a domain.

Manage all with topology mapping in VSA

IT professionals cannot manage what they cannot see. VSA offers comprehensive visibility into your IT environment for more efficient remote monitoring and management of your systems and networks. The easy-to-understand network topology map provides direct visibility, including a detailed breakdown of asset information, for all endpoints (agent and SNMP) on any network. The topology maps also include all virtual hosts and VMs and display the health status of all virtual elements on the network. With this sort of visibility, technicians can quickly detect issues and start the remediation process, which will ultimately reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) of IT incidents.

Leverage policy-based configuration in VSA

VSA enables multiple sets of policies to be applied automatically based on any set of groupings you want ― by customer, device type, user role or even location type ― and that can check that each device stays compliant with its assigned policies. This way, you can standardize and update all infrastructure under your care with confidence. Leverage powerful and flexible automation to keep up with multiple policies and update many devices by simply changing a policy once.

Manage your hybrid environment with VSA

Kaseya VSA is a next-generation, unified RMM solution that maximizes IT operational efficiency with complete IT asset discovery, monitoring and management. It gives you the visibility and functionality you need to manage all of IT in a single UI. If your RMM can’t manage your hybrid IT ecosystem, it’s time to upgrade. Request your demo today!

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