IT efficiency unlocked: Management meets SASE

# Introduction of Speakers

Eyal: Hi, I’m very happy to be here. My name is Eyal. I’m leading Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances at KO Networks. I know it’s a long title, but essentially, I’m a product marketeer with a few more hobbies in the company. 

Oshri: Hi everyone, I’m the CTO and co-founder of Atera. I’ve been having fun with AI lately, developing the system, listening to you guys, and doing the fun stuff. 

Anna: Do you want to cover maybe a bit about Atera? 

Oshri: Sure, we can. Maybe we’ll go back to the slides. Some of the audience here might not know Atera, so a few words. Atera is an all-in-one IT management platform powered by Agentic AI. We have customers in 120 countries around the globe, 13,000 customers, managing 5 million devices, and over 1 million tickets going through our system every month. 

# Overview of Atera 

Oshri: As I mentioned, Atera is an all-in-one IT management platform, including remote monitoring, patch management, service desk, automations, app center, and remote desktop. In the middle, you can see we have Agentic AI Autopilot and Copilot. Autopilot is something we’re working on right now with a few design partners helping us develop this system. It’s actually a first-tier support being done automatically by AI. We call it Autopilot. Your customers or clients can open tickets 24/7, and just like any human technician, the AI will check the issue and solve it. For instance, if your client is complaining about something like internet connection, the AI will diagnose the issue, use the Atera system to remotely connect to the end user device, and offer a one-click solution to the end user to solve the problem. From our design partners, we’re seeing something like 20 to 40% of tickets being solved automatically by Autopilot. It’s an amazing journey that we started two years ago, and I’ll tell all about it later on. 

# Overview of KO Networks 

Anna: Eyal, please tell us a bit about KO Networks and SASE for anyone who’s joining us and doesn’t really know. 

Eyal: We’re all in the IT space but from a different angle. We’re in the business of solving big problems for IT teams. Enterprises everywhere go through a digital transformation journey, which means there are a lot of advanced projects they need to solve, whether it’s growth through mergers and acquisitions, expanding globally, supporting the hybrid workforce, migrating applications to the cloud, and doing everything while controlling the cost of the network and network security infrastructure. To achieve that, Enterprises hope to build a network security infrastructure that is secure, resilient, agile, global, and optimized. The problem is that in reality, it looks very much like this: the infrastructure doesn’t have the same security everywhere, it’s difficult to maintain resiliency while keeping it agile, and expanding globally while optimizing cost is challenging. There is a great quote from Gartner that complexity is the enemy of availability, security, and agility. The solution is to stop looking at problems in isolation and solving them with point products but to converge multiple capabilities into a platform approach. This is what SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) is, and that’s exactly what KO Networks is doing. We’ve taken all the different point solutions that IT teams used to integrate to build the network and security infrastructure and reprogrammed them as a single software stack that lives in the cloud and is provided as a service. 

# Challenges for IT Teams 

Anna: You mentioned Gartner’s quote, and we’ve spoken about IT teams and the growing expectation and rising pressure on them to constantly over-deliver, especially with rising complexity. What are some of the biggest challenges that IT teams are dealing with right now in terms of improving efficiency and security while managing that complexity? 

Eyal: The main problem that IT teams face right now is proving their value to the organization. It’s a symptom of underlying problems like complexity. These are the smartest people in the Enterprise, but they need to master 100 applications, and people always come to them with complaints because things are slow, projects can’t move fast enough, and there’s slow innovation and growth. It’s not their fault; it’s the industry’s fault for not providing the right tools to operate efficiently. This is changing with the introduction of platform solutions instead of point products and AI, which brings a lot of improvement and efficiency. The result will be IT teams better expressing and presenting their value to the Enterprise. 

Oshri: I totally agree. IT teams are in a tough spot because they are expected to do everything: efficiency, tighten security, drive business impact, etc. But they are stuck with routine, everyday mundane tasks that pull them down. There’s also a shortage of skilled people. Their biggest challenge is figuring out how to clear their clutter from those tasks. Automation, smarter management tools, and AI are the things they need to adopt and implement to achieve more. 

# Proving ROI and Impact 

Anna: That takes us nicely to proving ROI or impact on the organization. I’m sure you’re dealing with the same challenges within our respective organizations. Do you have any tips or advice on what you’ve been doing in the past year to push these initiatives, or anything you’re planning on taking on this year? 

Eyal: We need to understand that we’re at a point in time where there’s a generational change in the tools we use. It’s a transformation, not an incremental change, and it may take time to see the actual ROI. It won’t come in day one or the first six months; it may take longer because we’re changing the way we look at and solve problems. At KO Networks, when customers adopt our platform, we usually replace multiple point solutions, so it’s a journey that can span months to several years. The big ROI often comes after two years when the level of consolidation is significant. The first product replacement might be cost-neutral with an improvement in efficiency and security posture, but not a financial return on investment. From the third year onward, customers start to see meaningful cost savings beyond operational and efficiency improvements. 

Oshri: I get what you’re saying, but the impact we’re seeing, especially with AI and Atera, is more immediate because,… I’ll give you an example that I just mentioned. Autopilot provides IT services 24/7, and it’s immediate. This means that the company automatically reduces SLA times to near zero. It’s not only the IT technician or the IT teams that become more efficient, but also the employees who enjoy their time being freed up by getting the service immediately when they have problems. So, it’s much easier in our environment to see the ROI. However, implementing Atera is challenging; you need to deploy the agents and set up the system correctly. At the beginning, the AI is just starting to learn your environment and your company, and it takes time to see higher AI numbers. So, I totally agree with you, and I think time is absolutely something that needs to be taken into consideration. 

Eyal: I think it’s actually a very interesting difference between the two platforms, and I’m happy for you that you can show a very quick ROI. I think it works well for you as a vendor and for your customers, and that’s probably one of the reasons you’ve been so successful. One of the differences we didn’t speak about while preparing for this meeting is that you live in the reactive world—something happens, and you fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible. We live mostly in the proactive world, trying to ensure nothing breaks, the network is never down, and no one hacks into the network. We’re more on the preemptive side of the IT infrastructure, and maybe that also impacts where we see the ROI. # From Reactive to Proactive with AI 

Anna: Eyal, you mentioned AI, and we’re talking about going from being reactive to proactive. AI plays a big part in that. Maybe you want to talk a bit about that and what it looks like when companies begin to integrate these AI agents or Agentic AI tools and how that helps answer both of these promises? 

Oshri: This is interesting because during the process of developing and testing Autopilot using our amazing partners, we realized that we actually deliver a proactive approach. Every time a user has an issue, the AI is there to solve it, but we also collect data and understand what causes those problems. We use those inputs to be more proactive. We have a system we call “Auto-detections,” where we gather data from over 1 million tickets a month and try to see how many of them we can eliminate. For example, one of the most common tickets we saw was resetting passwords. A user is stuck out of their computer, trying to log in, and can’t even open a ticket because they’re locked out. We’ve added a system that, after the third failed attempt, sends an immediate SMS from Autopilot saying, “Do you want to reset your password?” If they click “Yes,” they immediately get a temporary password. This eliminated this type of ticket entirely. Another case involves users moving with laptops between their network at the office and their homes. The default printer is not always set correctly, so when they go to the office, they can’t print because the printer is set to the one at home, and vice versa. Autopilot automatically adjusts it for them, so every time they click print, it just works. These examples show how we are taking steps from a reactive to a proactive approach, even with Autopilot. 

# Enhancing User Experience 

Eyal: I want to say something about that because it’s an area that intrigues me. The first example you mentioned, where users are locked out, their experience is that before they even open a ticket, someone thought about them, figured out they were stuck, sent an SMS, and solved the problem. Their experience is that someone helped them automatically. Setting the default printer is completely transparent. This is where I find it most intriguing—how to show the value of the solution. For us, the network never goes down, no one complains, and the security is always optimal. There’s a lot of value because no one breaks into the Enterprise, but if nothing bad happens, no one knows that someone was preventing it or failed to prevent it. 

Oshri: That’s a challenging one. Yesterday, we had a meeting on this exact scenario. I don’t have a solution for this yet, but yes, it’s challenging because we’re doing a lot of things behind the scenes to make things run smoothly, but we can’t always show that it’s happening. We have logs, of course, and things like that, but… 

Eyal: More than that, I think what drives this and why customers should care about it is that competition drives product excellence. We know, and many other vendors we compete with in our respective spaces know, that we need to go above and beyond to make our customers—our buyers—champions in the organization. It’s not only about the things that will be evident and presented in the dashboard but also everything that happens autonomously under the hood. At the end of it, the sum of the value we bring is greater than what you see on the dashboard, and this is what sets some vendors apart from the competitors in their markets.

# Communicating ROI to Customers 

Anna: This is a really interesting topic—how do you excel not just in solving problems proactively behind the scenes but also in being able to communicate it? Eyal, do you have anything interesting you want to share in terms of how KO Networks approaches ROI communication to actual customers? 

Eyal: If I’m now thinking about which example to give, we can show in our product or management application how many attacks we blocked, how many malware we prevented from entering the network or moving within the network, and how much we improved network reliability over time across even a global organization. But if you speak to KO Networks customers, and they speak with each other and analysts in the industry speak with customers, the feedback they get about how KO Networks helps them is not just about the technical details. I was fortunate to experience this firsthand at a conference in Barcelona a few months ago. I’m very lucky to be working for a vendor where customers come and say hi at the booth, and they are happy customers. They’re not coming to complain because their escalation didn’t work. Customers always come to our booth and say how much they like us. I say thank you for your business and for your trust, and then I asked one customer, who is the CIO of 5,000 employees, I asked a global manufacturer CIO what he liked about KO Networks the most, and he gave me a very short answer: “I sleep at night.” It’s completely unrelated to the technology we’ve built or the features listed on our website. It’s about the outcome he got. For him, this is the best ROI—sleeping at night is a metaphor for peace of mind, reliability, being able to deliver what the Enterprise needs, and knowing the network is always secure. This is an unquantifiable ROI, but when customers and prospects speak with each other, this is the thing that seals the deal more than anything else. 

Oshri: I think we can agree. As a CTO, you like sleeping soundly at night. We don’t sleep so our customers can sleep. 

# Addressing Questions 

Anna: We did have a question pop up, and maybe we can take it now since Eyal was talking about password resets. There’s a question from Jud asking, “Can admins get notified when a password reset happens?” 

Oshri: Yes, absolutely. Behind the scenes, when it happens, unlike the printer setting the right default one, we open and close the ticket. Autopilot logs everything inside the ticket, so you’ll be able to see that it happened and the user got everything they needed. 

Anna: Amazing. And maybe we’ll take one more targeted question. Eyal, can you explain how long the onboarding process is and what challenges one should anticipate when integrating SASE into existing services? 

Eyal: Sure. The answer to how long the onboarding process takes really depends on how fast the customer can move. In terms of the simplicity of deploying a solution like KO Networks, it can be extremely fast. We can onboard hundreds of branches in a week and thousands of users to the service. Everything is highly automated and plug-and-play. What really slows this down is how fast the Enterprise can move, in terms of having a maintenance window to install our Edge Appliance, connect it to our cloud, and transition from legacy technology to the KO SASE platform. Generally speaking, it’s extremely fast. We had one customer who had to rebuild their entire network from the ground up after a huge security breach before they became a KO customer. They were able to connect 180 branches in 50 countries and 5,000 users in less than four weeks. It can be extremely fast, but usually, Enterprises don’t do it that quickly because they have legacy technology to migrate from. 

#Managing Hybrid Workforces and Distributed Teams 

Anna: Let’s move to a different topic that’s also a super challenge for IT teams—reaching efficiency when thinking about hybrid workforces and globally distributed teams. IT has to keep everything secure and manage such versatile and broader environments. What would you say are the biggest challenges that come with managing these types of environments, and how can SASE and AI help? 

Eyal: One of the things that really helps teams become more efficient, beyond technology, is standardizing processes and tools. SASE helps networking and security teams, which in larger organizations are usually siloed and not collaborating well, to standardize on a platform that serves both sides of the house. This includes not only the infrastructure technology but also how you manage and monitor it and handle incidents efficiently. Standardization is a powerful tool, but it has to come with robust and granular role-based access control. The bigger and more distributed the Enterprise, the more detailed the audit log needs to be, allowing admins and security teams to control who can do what and who can see what. We’re dealing with the Enterprise’s data, private information of employees, and sometimes private information of customers, so it needs to be done with full responsibility and visibility. 

Oshri: From the IT service perspective, managing a global hybrid work setup is challenging. IT needs to juggle different work schedules, handle more employees, and provide 24/7 service. Of course, AI  plays a significant role in managing global hybrid work setups. It helps automate routine tasks, allowing IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. For example, AI can monitor network performance and security in real-time, flagging issues before they become critical. It can also provide predictive analytics to help IT teams anticipate and address potential problems proactively. By leveraging AI, IT teams can ensure seamless operations across different time zones and locations, providing consistent and reliable service to employees regardless of where they are working. 

Eyal: Exactly. AI helps in standardizing processes and tools, ensuring that all team members, whether remote or in-office, have access to the same resources and support. It also aids in automating repetitive tasks, freeing up IT staff to focus on more complex issues. This is particularly important in a hybrid work environment where IT teams might be stretched thin due to the increased number of endpoints and the need for constant monitoring and support. 

Anna: Thank you both for your insights. It’s clear that both SASE and AI play crucial roles in enhancing efficiency and security for IT teams managing hybrid and distributed workforces.

Oshri: I mentioned Autopilot, which can provide 24/7 service, close tickets, and reduce SLA times, even when IT teams are off the clock. AI automation helps with this topic as well. 

Anna: Amazing. Let’s move on to a topic that is very relevant to those running IT budgets within their companies. We know that budgets are often stretched very thin. Everybody always wants to know how IT teams can optimize the resources they have. Should they expand both in tools and personnel without compromising security and service quality? 

#Optimizing IT Resources 

Oshri: I can start. It’s all about getting the most out of your tools and people. Identify bottlenecks, identify repetitive work, and automate it. Use amazing tools like AI and automations. We have this philosophy at Atera called “automate everything.” Everything that you do twice, try to automate it. That’s my advice to the audience—just do it. When you do, you get the most out of your people, freeing up time to work on security, technical debt, and projects that you usually don’t have enough time to do. 

Eyal: I’ll complement what you’re saying, which I agree with 100%. I wish I could automate everything I do more than once, but I haven’t got there yet. The question of cost can also be looked at from the perspective of risk. Both KO Networks and Atera are relatively new players in our industries, to a large extent disruptive players. Many organizations have a low risk appetite and prefer to stay with traditional tools they know and are trained on, even if they’re not perfect but good enough. What we’re seeing in the industry, and Atera touched on it earlier with the skill shortage in IT and security, is that continuing to use legacy tools burns out staff. They get exhausted because they do so much manual work and fall under pressure. Providing new tools that drive automation and efficiency, enriched with advanced technologies like AI, brings more energy, enthusiasm, and motivation into the day-to-day work. It helps retain these employees. If you think about medium or large enterprises, every employee in the IT team matters. Every time you lose one, there’s a huge hole to fill, even just in available hands to do the work. Using innovative technologies helps retain employees and reduces the risk of losing them, which has a huge cost impact on enterprises. 

#Retaining Talent with Innovative Tools 

Anna: That’s a great point. We’re always talking about how to retain talent, and that’s by empowering them with the most innovative tools out there. I want to ask, maybe not a question about your customers, but can you elaborate a bit on how you go about choosing your tech stack? How do you evaluate these types of tools to make sure you’re making the right decision and really empowering these employees? 

Eyal: Very much like Atera, we’re looking to introduce automation and AI and efficiency not where it’s shiny and eye-catching and has a wow factor in the sales pitch, but in places that would actually make a difference in day-to-day operations. We’re both service companies, replacing, in many cases, product companies. Product companies have a one-time transaction every 3 to 5 years. They can do a great sales pitch, sell, walk away, and in five years, it’s someone else’s problem. As a service company, which most companies are today, if you don’t do a good job, customers churn. We always have to be on our toes to continue delivering value and increasing the value we bring to the enterprise. It can’t stay static; it has to continuously increase. At KO Networks, we always look at what the problems are now. If we have a customer we’ve onboarded, we manage their network and security, and they’re fully deployed and happy, there’s always something more we can do for them. We analyze customer behaviors, have a customer advisory board, meet with customers, and our product management team travels all over the world meeting with customers, collecting requests for enhancements. We monitor these requests very accurately to understand what the next benefit and improvement we can bring to them is. I’m assuming the practice is not much different for you, but that’s the logic. It’s not about what’s shiny and eye-catching but what actually delivers long-lasting value to the buyer. 

#AI First Approach 

Oshri: I totally agree. As a CTO of a big company with a lot of different departments, I think, and this is something very interesting about the role that is changing now with AI growing and adding more and more amazing tools that can help almost every department in the company, I developed a new way of thinking. I’m trying to preach it in Atera—an “AI first” approach. We’re in an era of new tools and new ways to do almost everything. I think it’s the right time to look for tools that do things a bit differently. The results are amazing. We have replaced old legacy tools with innovative solutions, especially in places where AI came to help, and the results were amazing.

Eyal: Exactly like AI mentioned, it’s not only because these tools are shiny and very nice. They provide amazing solutions, make us more efficient, and they’re here to stay. 

Anna: Off that topic, I saw a great question come in, something that’s brought up quite often. Speaking about AI and integrating AI with autonomous IT, what about the risks? It’s a question from George asking about risks around data privacy and customers’ data. 

#Addressing Data Privacy Risks 

Oshri: I’ll take it, as I’ve mentioned AI a lot during this session. When working with AI, and as we are developing the most innovative solutions, security and privacy are the number one things to check before using these tools. You need to see that the companies are implementing techniques like responsible AI. We are Microsoft partners in this area, working closely with them on everything we do. We don’t share private information with AI, we don’t train on customers’ data, and we use dedicated models in a private cloud. We are not using public models that take data and train on it. Make sure, as we do when evaluating products, that they follow all the latest and greatest techniques, like responsible AI. Yes, it’s a big concern, and our CISO and security team are doing amazing work every time we offer a new tool. It’s challenging because the risks are there. 

Eyal: I agree with everything you said. It’s very much similar at KO Networks in terms of processes to integrate new AI capabilities, data protection, and privacy protection. It’s super critical because it’s tempting to run fast and lose sight of customers’ data, but it’s not something we can afford if we want the trust and business of our customers long-term. KO Networks is heavily invested in security research specifically in the AI domain. We publish articles, blog posts, give interviews, and keynotes. There are so many risks with AI, and every company that uses these technologies has to understand the risks and have a clear mitigation plan and guardrails to protect both the company and customers’ data and information. # Autonomous AI and IT Management Anna: Thank you both. From what we’re seeing, a lot of questions around security risks come from trying to understand how autonomous AI is going to be. Is it 100% autonomous? Who’s actually in the driver’s seat? Not just behind the scenes, but making sure everything is operating properly. Oshri, do you want to touch on this for another minute to explain Atera’s approach around autonomous AI? 

Oshri: Sure. I’ll share everything I can, but we’re working on a lot of new stuff that I cannot share yet. We’ve been working closely with Microsoft on Autopilot and Copilot for two and a half years. We have something like 60 AI agents now. Not all of them are completely autonomous, but we do have some autonomous agents. They have specialities and professions, know how to do specific tasks, and can also take decisions, perform actions, and connect using tools to different systems. They can do everything a human employee can do, but they work 24/7 and don’t complain about repetitive mundane tasks. I can’t share everything we do right now, but stay tuned because we have amazing things coming soon. 

#Preparing for the Future 

Anna: I’m looking at the time and want to be mindful of our audience. If you have any more questions, this is the right time to place them in the chat. If not, I think we can maybe talk about the future or share things you can share. For example, what piece of advice would you give to IT leaders who want to get ready for what’s coming and future-proof their IT operations and security strategies? 

Oshri: We’re in the middle of an AI revolution. Amazing tools are out there, changing the way we write code and do things in the IT industry, marketing, and the work environment. My piece of advice is to check out KO Networks and Atera—that’s the place to be. 

Eyal: Can I give advice too? 

Anna: Of course. 

Eyal: Besides checking out Atera, I would say specifically in the SASE space, it’s a relatively new domain with big players like Cisco, Palo Alto, and Zscaler. The big ones don’t necessarily move as fast in technology as the smaller ones. You’ll see similar marketing pitches and messages but very different underlying technologies. My advice to IT leaders is to ensure you don’t settle for a good presentation and quick demo. Get hands-on with the technology, either as IT leadership or through your team, and see how day-to-day operations will look beyond the sales pitches and presentations. The differences in technology are huge. 

# Closing Remarks 

Anna: I really want to thank you both. I’m reviewing the Q&A tab to make sure we didn’t miss any questions. Unless you want to add something here, I think this would be a great time to wish everyone a wonderful day and thank you again for joining us for this amazing talk. Another reminder—you will be getting a recording of this webinar right after we wrap up. Thank you so much. 

Eyal: Thank you, Anna. 

Oshri: See you next time. 

Anna: Bye everyone!