Kaseya IT Automation Framework is a suite of offerings that integrates and automates basic IT tasks such as systems and patch management, IT asset management, software deployment, data protection, policy management, compliance, endpoint security, backup and disaster recovery, reporting and service desk. It manages systems and network resources within one integrated web-based interface.
The concept is simple: "What does an IT system administrator do? Let's automate it." The solution is loaded as software on your serving platform. It requires SQL server for its backend data repository. It is an agent-based solution and has support for most operating systems. We were told a typical deployment takes hours.
Once the assets are discovered, the features are applied through policy and schedule-driven tasks. The lightweight agent can be deployed through various distribution options. Active Directory discovery is available. We found a nice feature: the role based on discovery options allows you to set both rules and scope, detailing what each can be used to do and then manage what they can do that to.
There is nice user management, as detailed as it gets, and remote control of the endpoint with or without user knowledge, snapshots of screens, and full licence inventory.
Communications between the server and agent are encrypted using 256-bit strength. You can still secure your endpoints by removing remote control options from them and still remote-control them via the agent.
Ticket, chat, alerting and reporting are strong. The business procedures capability that allows for workflow creation based upon policy and procedures fully integrates with the ticketing and servicing modules, providing one of the more intuitive problem reporting, change request and incident management interfaces I have seen. Third party integration is available for supporting backup and recovery and AV management.
This is a strong contender for an enterprise endpoint management solution. The only drawback we were able to find is the price, so we award this one our Best Buy this month.