IT management tools can help organizations automate routine tasks and improve their workflows. The only problem is that finding the right tools that fit in with your existing tech stack can be a daunting task.
In this post, we’ll take a look at ten of the best IT management tools for SMBs that you can use to better manage your resources, secure your data, and automate various routine tasks.
1. Cloud Management Suite
Cloud Management Suite (CMS) is a powerful IT management software that offers predictive tools to help you detect and eliminate vulnerabilities in your organization. Unlike traditional management software, it is a simple, cloud-based solution which uses agentless servers to carry out operations.
It comes with built-in patch management capabilities for all major platforms including Windows, MacOS, Linux, and also IoT devices. CMS is used by businesses to quickly gather inventory and deploy patches, generate customized reports, distribute software distribution and more.
SMBs that have concerns about data and privacy regulations need IT management software, to help their IT managers meet the compliance requirements of various regulations like HIPAA, NCUA/FFIEC, and PCI.
2. PacketFence
SMBs usually have a tight budget and limited resources to spend on IT management solutions. This makes PacketFence an ideal tool as it falls under open source software which means you can modify, optimize, and extend the solution.
It supports migration from your existing platforms and integrates seamlessly with your organization’s in-house systems. PacketFence offers a number of features including layer-2 isolation of problematic devices, 802.1x support, guest management functionality, centralized wireless, and wired management, and captive-portal registration and remediation.
PacketFence is used by both small and medium companies as well as large organizations to effectively secure their data networks. Its support staff offers troubleshooting and deployment assistance and can also help you develop customized features for your IT management software.
3. Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos is a powerful distributed systems kernel that helps organizations isolate clustered computer resources into CPU, storage, memory, disk, ports, and GPU.
It offers linear scalability up to tens of thousands of nodes which can help SMBs meet their growing requirements. Some of the standout features on offer with Apache Mesos include fault tolerance, high availability, and support for launching containers with Docker and AppC.
Mesos supports resource sharing across multiple frameworks. It works similar to a Windows or Mac operating system that manages access to the resources on a computer. It also offers a built-in web UI that displays cluster state and container sandboxes.
Apache Mesos is open source and offers access to a vibrant community of members that can help you customize and configure the software to meet your organization’s needs.
4. Grafana
Grafana is an open source analytics software that allows businesses to monitor, visualize, and extract meaning from data stored across various platforms.
While large corporations hire third-party services to handle their data analytics, SMBs can use Grafana to make sense of big numbers. Visual tools like heatmaps, graphs, histograms, and geo-maps can help your team members better understand metrics and make informed decisions quickly.
It integrates with tools like Slack and PagerDuty to send you alert notifications when patterns that match with your set thresholds are discovered. Grafana supports several databases like Graphite, Elasticsearch, and CloudWatch and lets you easily bring data into a single dashboard.
Grafana is open source and you can choose to either use the cloud-based version to save storage space or install it on a different platform such as Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
5. ReportMiner
ReportMiner is a powerful IT management tool that allows organizations to extract meaning from unstructured data. It offers SaaS extraction which means you can send your data files to their systems and have your extracted solution delivered on a fully hosted website. This will also help you cut back on hardware resource spend.
ReportMiner can extract data from spreadsheets, machine logs, PDF forms, and emails to generate useful insights. Its wide range of support for unstructured data formats like TXT, DOC, DOCX, PRN, and XLS makes it ideal for SMBs who can’t afford expensive data extraction solutions.
With ReportMiner, you’re also able to help your team members automatically extract data from emails, network folders, and files and automate different tasks like name and contact information parsing, job scheduling, and auto-generating data-extraction patterns.
6. CloudBerry Backup
CloudBerry Backup is a popular Windows OS and server backup solution that’s built to meet the needs of small businesses. It offers integration across various platforms including Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
It is an ideal solution for SMBs looking for advanced data security from their endpoint and the server. CloudBerry uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure your data on the source side in addition to SSL protocols to protect the data while it is in transit. It checks for encryption changes in files and protects backups from being overwritten by giving you administrator control.
Some of its main features include file-level restoration from a backup copy image, mailbox level restoration for Microsoft Exchange 2010, restoration of Microsoft SQL Server databases and backup files, and data restoration from USB flash directly from the cloud.
CloudBerry also offers data compression which can help your organization reduce storage costs, save bandwidth, and speed up your Windows Server backups. It offers full, incremental, and block-level backups which help businesses use their storage space efficiently.
7. Rigor
Rigor is a performance monitoring and optimization solution that helps organizations track their user’s experience, share valuable insights with stakeholders, and make suggestions to optimize their performance.
It enables businesses to instantly detect performance issues and fix bugs before they affect users. You’re also able to constantly monitor HTTP availability and response time and take appropriate actions.
Rigor can monitor performance KPIs from various platforms for instance websites, mobile web, APIs, ads, and servers. It makes it easy and cost-effective for SMBs to track their website performance and find out how they stack up against the competition on the basis of KPIs such as render time, page size, and load time.
8. CCleaner Business
CCleaner is a powerful cleaning and optimization solution that enables businesses to improve their computers’ performance. It boosts computer speeds, frees up disk space, and extends their working life.
CCleaner works by removing junk files from your computers – like temporary internet files, form history, cookies, super cookies, and download history. These files contain sensitive information (including user behavior and saved passwords) that can be a security risk for your business. It also searches for junk files in other locations like the Recycle Bin, Temporary files, Recent Documents, Memory Dumps, DNS Cache, and Log files.
CCleaner allows SMBs to save time on PC maintenance by automating tasks using scheduling, scripting, and command-line address.
9. MiniTool Partition Wizard
MiniTool Partition Wizard is a popular partition management software for hard disk drives. It offers an easy-to-use interface with wide-ranging functions including data recovery, lost partition recovery, and dynamic disk to basic disk conversion. It supports all popular file systems including NTFS, exFAT, FAT12/16/32, EXT2/3/4, as well as full support on GPT partitions.
SMBs have limited resources and they need a simple solution to make the most out of their existing hardware. MiniTool allows you to easily optimize your disk usage and protect your data.
There was a time when partitioning your hard drive involved either calling third-party tech support or risk losing all the data stored on it. MiniTool’s Partition Wizard can help you resize, move, create, delete, format, copy, convert, recover, align, join, split, hide and unhide local and server files in just a few clicks.
10. Software AG’s Portfolio Management
Software AG’s IT Portfolio Management is a widely-used solution that helps organizations evaluate assets, risks, and returns in the IT landscape. It’s used by businesses to make informed decisions regarding investments.
Portfolio Management allows managers to develop a comprehensive view which helps them find the interdependence between different portfolios on the basis of technologies, projects, applications, and APIs.
It can also help SMBs take business decisions, for instance, target a new market segment or support a product or business innovation.
Conclusion
As an IT manager, you need to have a tech stack that allows you to oversee the company’s entire technology infrastructure and make an informed decision. With the right tools, you can automate many routine tasks and take much of the heavy lifting off your plate.
What are some of your favorite IT management tools and why? Let us know by commenting below.