[Customer Story] A Single Pane of Glass for Managing Servers by Sean O’Sullivan

Client Snapshot: Sean O’Sullivan

A self-described “technology addict,” Sean has been working in the IT industry for over a decade, doing his best to keep servers (and their users) happy. Outside of work, you’re likely to find him playing an unhealthy amount of Forza or attempting to build something. (The time machine is still a work in progress.) You can follow Sean on Twitter at @seanosullivanuk, and subscribe to his very interesting blog Pixelated Perspective.

Sean’s Challenges

At the beginning, in order to connect to remote servers using various tools (e.g. RDP, SFTP, iDRAC, vCenter, etc.), Sean created a folder on his taskbar that contained shortcuts. However, as more remote servers were added to the infrastructure this approach grew unwieldy rather quickly, and triggered key challenges including:

• Being unable to effectively manage these growing resources with a single, scalable tool
• Support tickets (sometimes requiring prerequisites ) generated from end users who needed quick access to remote customers created a bottleneck and reduced his team’s productivity.
• It was a security risk to provide users with the login credentials for privileged accounts.

Sean’s Solution: Remote Desktop Manager

Sean realized that there had to be a better way to manage his growing collection of credentials and servers with granular permissions with a single tool that could scale. As such, he researched potential products and created a shortlist that included Remote Desktop Manager. After trying Remote Desktop Manager in his environment, he concluded that it was (in his words), “the clear winner.”

Since implementing Remote Desktop Manager Enterprise five years ago, Sean continues to enjoy key benefits that include:

• A single pane of glass for managing servers, network devices and cloud-based service across the organization, for both the internal network and cloud platforms.
• A dramatic reduction in the amount of IT tickets generated around remote connections and remote support. End users simply need to search for their desired remote customer and “double-click.”
• Support for a wide range of session types, such as Microsoft RDP, Citrix, iDRAC, SFTP, SSH, as well as consoles for AWS, VMware, Azure, and more.
• Mature built-in password management functionality that secures credentials with granular permissions, so that certain staff can connect to a server without ever seeing the username or password.
• The ability to use the Command Line entry type to create a true single sign-on experience. Sean outlined one example of this functionality in his guest blog post “Create SSMS Shortcuts with Remote Desktop Manager.”

Here’s what Sean says about his experience with Remote Desktop Manager:

“My team has a single pane of glass for managing our infrastructure’s servers, network devices and cloud based services, for both the internal networks and our robust cloud platform. Other areas of the business benefit in other ways such as having a product that simplifies access to supporting our customers, without compromising security. RDM is so powerful and capable, I wouldn’t want to be without it.”