NTRglobal, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, recently released its NTRadmin remote IT management product in North America, offering the product as both on-demand software as a service (SaaS) and traditionally licensed, standalone solutions. NTRadmin is platform independent, says Andre Angel, president and CEO of NTRglobal North America, and the SaaS version makes it easy and cost-effective for IT administrators to implement a remote management solution. “What we’re trying to do as a company is to remove the complexity from IT management,” says Angel. “You don’t have to spend a lot to get into the [NTRadmin] solution; you’re paying as you go, so the ROI is almost immediate.”
Bots, Not Scripts
NTRadmin uses an innovative approach to task automation, by providing bots, or mini applications, to perform remote management tasks. NTRadmin provides a library of prebuilt bots for customers, and customers can also build their own bots and share them with other NTRadmin users. Bots perform a variety of jobs, such as remote monitoring of security settings, automated patch distribution, software auditing, and “green” tasks such as shutting down or hibernating a system after a period of inactivity.
Angel agrees that the tasks that bots perform could be just as well performed by scripts but cites simplicity as a key advantage of bots over scripts. “You could write scripts, but it’s hard to manage scripts from a central location, [whereas] you can manage your entire bot capability and schedule it from a central location.”
Secure Remote Sessions
Although other remote-control SaaS solutions are available, such as WebEx PCNow, Citrix GoToMyPC, and TeamViewer, Angel says that NTRadmin’s main differentiator is its security. “We use an end-to-end architecture and 256-bit encryption keys for secure sessions; we control these keys at the end terminal. We don’t decrypt, so there’s no potential for man-in-the-middle attacks.”The SaaS version of NTRadmin is priced at $9 per device, with a 15-day free trial and volume discounts available. You can find more information about NTRadmin on NTRglobal’s NTRadmin page.