KACE On the Go: Is Imaging Dead?

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome. This is "KACE On the Go," a vlog series on trending topics and KACE solutions. Are you struggling to keep track of your assets and make sure they're updated and secure even when they're remote? Are you ready for the next cybersecurity attack? Are you leaving your data center behind and moving to the cloud? You're not alone. Welcome to the "KACE On the Go" vlog. Imaging is dead, or is it? Hey, welcome to "KACE On the Go." My name is James Rico. I'm a solutions consultant with KACE. I have Tim Elicker and Mark Weathersbee here with me. Guys, you want to introduce yourself? As James said, my name is Tim Elicker. I am a Sales Engineer with Quest KACE. I've been with the company for about five years. I'm Mark Weathersbee. I am a former KACE customer. And I've been a KACE employee for 13 years. All right. Well, I got-- I've been here about 12. So, well, I got some time in grade with KACE and various products here. So, yeah, so I think the thing we want to talk about today is, is there still a place for imaging in the IT landscape? Some people are saying, it's dead. I'd like to counter that argument and see what you guys think. So, Tim, we'll start with you. What are your thoughts on imaging, and is it dead? I do not believe that imaging is dead. It definitely has a niche. And there is still quite a bit of use for it in enterprise organizations, specifically around when you have to-- perhaps you have a lot of applications in your environment, or you have to have conformity among your endpoints. Perhaps you have specific environment variables, reg keys, things like that, that need to be set. And with an image, you do have the ability to preset all of that. So when you drop that image on your devices, essentially, you're getting conformity and uniformity around all of your endpoints. Yeah. And there's definitely things that modern style management isn't going to easily let you do, like reg keys and different things like that you just mentioned. So doing it once and copying it sounds like a good plan. Mark, what do you think? Yeah, definitely agree with Tim in that instance. It's one of those areas that I don't think is going to go away-- I won't say, forever, but at least anytime soon. There are still use cases for it. And, for example, in the government and contractor, as far as DOD contractor sectors, where the government just has, here's your ISO that you've got to use in your environment. You can add things on to it, but this is your base image. So there are many government entities that still go through and do that, and where you have to actually go out, download the ISO. And then you can possibly do some things to it, add in additional software. But this is your base image. So especially in those areas where heightened security, air-gapped networks, things like that are key where they're looking for human uniformity across their environments. Certainly that's an area that is not going to go away in anytime soon. I don't even believe it's being discussed possibly ending that. Because, again, in many times, those are air-gapped networks, for example. But even not, they're still going through and giving that base image that everybody has to use and as far as their base image and start with. So they can add in their additional software on top of it to do whatever engineering and development work they need to. But that's where they're starting at. Yeah. So sometimes you just-- here's your image, take it. No, that makes sense. Yeah, and you said that air gap network. But I've got some customers too that have a lot of machines and very low bandwidth. So modern style provisioning may not be the best fit for there either. I think, for me, comes to mind, there's a security play into it, or just a, I don't know, functionality play of, hey, somebody's machine screwed up. They downloaded the wrong thing, just having problems for whatever, or ransomware or something bad happened. I'd like to go out, pull down the latest ISO for Microsoft, set it up, blast that out, then trying to trust some AB tool, or spend hours on end over there trying to figure out what happened and repair an OS when everybody's got all their files and stuff in the cloud now anyway. So just reimage the device, make sure it's safe, secure, and get it on out there. Well, hey, I guess we've decided imaging is not dead. I guess, three votes imaging is not dead. Any final thoughts or use cases before we hop off? There are a few use cases, specifically larger, like an engineering firm, or perhaps universities, that have just a massive payload that they have to deploy. In a lot of cases, enrollment-based deployments aren't really going to fit that bill very well-- Yeah. --where you have massive installers, like CAD apps, and development utilities, and things like that. Sometimes it's just good to just bake that in, in order to ease deployment for your technicians. Definitely. Mark, any parting thoughts? Yeah, in addition, it was recent marketing events where I spoke with some oil and gas customers specifically, but it translates over into mining as well, low bandwidth sites where they've got 50 to 100 endpoints. And you got to do repairs of images at those as well. So you're not going to pull down or do a modern autopilot type deployments. You're still going to need that bare metal image because it's just simply the fastest method. When you've got a five meg pipe for 100 nodes setup out in the middle of nowhere, you're not going to be deploying images across that. So having some