Mentor Network Automates Patching and Imaging with KACE

The Mentor Network has many different areas that they support. We're in 32 different states. We have 400 offices. And we also have almost 3,000 group homes and foster care facilities as well. My role at The Mentor Network, I'm the supervisor for end user technology. The operational problems that I had to try to solve were we were using a legacy environment, and we were managing 17 different images, and we didn't have a unified way of reporting back issues, patching. But by implementing KACE, we're able to get 95% Patch Management compliance on all of our systems within the first year. And we were able to reduce the amount images from 17 down to 1. For the SMA, identifying what you had in your environment and the reporting capabilities of the SMA appliance, not just the can reporting, but the ability to create your own custom reports whether it be through the Wizard, or whether it be through Custom Sequel Reporting, it was essentially a godsend. When we were in initially taking a look at different products to perform these solutions, we looked at all the different competitors. But I like to say that KACE does a lot of things that the other products do as well, if not better. Also, Quest has a lot of relationships with a lot of third party vendors. So they can customize the things that you need to do specific for your company in not only from a technical standpoint, but from a financial standpoint. And it's so easy to implement. It's so easy to use. It's a no-brainer. How KACE plays a role in security in my environment. First, the appliances themselves are very secure. You don't have to worry about your solution being a hole attackers and malicious intruders can use to access your internal network. Not only from the patching, but from the reporting ability to create custom dashboards. So you can see where your issues are, and then you can develop strategies to mitigate those security issues. So we just upgraded to the latest version of the SDA. We're in the process of migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10. But we actually like the way that the SDA appliance deploys Windows 10, the way it injects the drivers into WIM image as you're deploying it, it just makes the process so much easier. There's not a lot of hands that are required to be in the development of the image, just because it's literally drag and drop. I like KACE specifically for the capabilities it provides me, and my company, and my users to quickly ascertain issues, quickly troubleshoot those issues, quickly fix those issues, and to rapidly scale implementations of operating systems, applications, and report it.