AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Simplified Help Desk and Endpoint Management with Track-It! on AWS
By Cris Coffey, Principal Product Manager – BMC Software
By Sunil Bemarkar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Scott Kellish, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Shashiraj Jeripotula, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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| BMC Software |
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When a company needs to deploy a help desk and endpoint management system to manage IT operations and asset management, the process is fairly simple if limited to a local network in a single location. When a company’s IT assets are distributed around a city, country, or even globally, however, this setup becomes more complex.
To successfully implement a solution that allows help desk users and technicians anywhere in the world to securely access help desk tickets or IT asset information reliably, a great deal of knowledge of network security, infrastructure, redundancy, load balancing, and accessibility is needed.
This often results in a company hiring new people that can take on this task. They will train existing employees, hire outside consultants to set up and manage the system, or some combination of both. In any case, the process is not easy and certainly not cheap.
The new AWS Quick Start for Track-It! help desk software by BMC Software solves this problem by simplifying the setup, configuration, and ongoing management of the system. It provides users an easy to implement, secure, globally accessible help desk and endpoint management system in a fraction of the time and cost of doing it yourself.
BMC is an AWS Partner with Competencies in Migration and Modernization and also DevOps. BMC offers a comprehensive set of solutions for the management of dynamic, cloud-based applications and the monitoring and provisioning of Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
Track-It! Help Desk and Endpoint Management
The Track-It! help desk and endpoint management system helps an organization track all IT tasks and end-user issues and requests in one place so that work doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Track-It! allows you to build a knowledge base of common solutions to help end users solve problems and your help desk technicians to work smarter. Automated asset discovery identifies systems across your hybrid enterprise, and then helps you manage those systems via remote management tools for tasks such as software deployment, applying patches automatically, and even enforcing compliance rules.
Track-It! handles all aspects of IT management including ticketing, self-service, knowledge management, change management, purchasing, network discovery, asset auditing, remote control, patch management, software deployment, and mobile device management.
The Deployment Challenge
The Track-It! help desk software solution is designed and targeted toward small to medium-sized businesses who may not have the infrastructure and resources to pull off this configuration in a secure and reliable way.
Prior to this collaboration between BMC and AWS, a company who wanted to deploy the Track-It! help desk solution for multiple locations to access in a way that was easy to implement, manage, secure, and scale as extremely difficult.
The process involved quite a bit of time for the customer to research solutions, design the setup that would work for them, and then stumble through implementing it or hire outside help to do the implementation. In either case, the customer would typically end up with something that performed sub-optimally, lacked necessary redundancy, was not reliably backed up, and was not as secure as it needed to be.
In many cases, customers spent a great deal of time, effort, and money just to get to that point.
Secure Global Access to Track-It! via AWS Quick Start
AWS Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for specific and well-defined workloads on the AWS Cloud. They are built by AWS solutions architects and AWS Partners and based on AWS Well-Architected principles.
Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS. They are designed to reduce manual intervention to a few steps so you can build and start using your environments quickly.
The recently launched Track-It! on AWS Quick Start simplifies the deployment and management of Track-It! The Quick Start also allows the extensive functionality of the Track-It! help desk and endpoint management solution to be immediately available as a cloud-based solution backed by the security, reliability and accessibility of AWS.
Track-It! on AWS allows customers to set up, install, configure, and deploy the Track-It! application onto a public-facing web server accessible to any of their users around the world in just a few minutes. The power, functionality, and flexibility offered by AWS allows users to easily upgrade memory, add disk space, adjust access control, back up the system, move the system, and monitor the system, all easily within the AWS environment.
The process is as easy as setting up an AWS account, selecting the Track-It! AWS Quick Start, selecting the anticipated environment size you need, and adapting the default settings in the Quick Start configuration screen as needed. AWS then deploys the Track-It! server with minimal manual effort by the user.
Active Directory on AWS is deployed with the solution, which can be optionally federated to your on-premises Active Directory if needed, to import users into the system to get up and running quickly. The entire process results in a secure, globally accessible system which saves you time and money due to the reduced resources and time required for set up, deployment, management, and maintenance of the system.
The Quick Start automates the deployment of the architecture shown in the following diagram.
Figure 1 – Quick Start architecture for Track-It! on AWS.
As seen above, the Quick Start sets up the following:
- Highly available architecture that spans two AWS Availability Zones (AZs).*
- Virtual private Cloud (VPC) configured with public and private subnets, according to AWS best practices, to provide you with your own virtual network on AWS.*
- Managed internet gateway to direct inbound traffic to a Network Load Balancer.
- In the public subnets, managed network address translation (NAT) gateways to allow outbound internet access for resources in the private subnets.*
- In the private subnet of AZ 1, an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance with Microsoft SQL Server, Track-It!, and BMC Client Management software.
- AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) to provide a fully managed Active Directory domain to which the Track-It! EC2 instance is joined.
- Amazon CloudWatch to monitor, store, and access log files from EC2 instances.
* The template that deploys the Quick Start into an existing VPC skips the tasks marked by asterisks and prompts you for your existing VPC configuration.
To learn more about deployment, visit AWS Quick Start for Track-It! on AWS.
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BMC Software – AWS Partner Spotlight
BMC is an AWS Partner that offers a comprehensive set of solutions for the management of dynamic, cloud-based applications and the monitoring and provisioning of AWS infrastructure.