IT OPERATIONS
Balancing Money and Time
People Helping People
In our experience, winery people are wonderful people. Passionate about creating great experiences for wine lovers, passionate about their region, and of course passionate
about their product. We've also found that winery people are businesspeople. We've seen the industry go through a number of interesting shifts over the past decade, and we've seen, more often than not, resilient wineries adapt.
We're proud to say we have helped our clients adapt. Year over year many organizations find they are facing the same challenges and not making substantive progress on fundamentals like increasing productivity, boosting staff morale, increasing functionality, lowering overall technology costs, reaching better profit margins, and most importantly finding peace of mind. ​
In the end it's about finding the right balance between time and money. Spending money on IT as strategically as possible such that staff are free to make great wine and engage consumers while keeping operational costs to a minimum.
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We know how to help.
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Healthy IT Operations depend on a set of expert human beings (our Grape Squad) leveraging a proven set of optimized solutions to help another set of human beings (winery staff). These solutions are what we call our "TCP Core" which the Grape Squad uses to take care of clients under our Total Care Plan.​​​
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Total Care Plan Core Solutions
Our TCP Core consists of five solutions:
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IT Leadership - Strategic Business/Technology Alignment
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Service Desk - Installation, Maintenance, and Support
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Network - Network Management & Monitoring
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Endpoint - Endpoint Management & Monitoring
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User - User/SaaS Protection & Security Training
IT Leadership
Strategic Business/Technology Alignment​
It is surprisingly easy to spend far more than is necessary on technology and still not achieve business objectives. Technology evolves constantly (and more and more quickly) and wineries, more than many businesses, are constantly looking for new ways to enhance consumer experiences and establish new competitive advantages.
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The thing that's most needed is someone who understands technology intimately and who also understands the challenges wineries face as they grow. The goal is to be able to methodically create balanced IT roadmaps over time (quarter over quarter and year over year) which are absolutely focused on individual winery business objectives while leveraging lessons learned from across the industry. This is where our biggest strength lies. To learn more, see IT Leadership.
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The TCP Core technology we have chosen to help us in our efforts here is Humanize IT, a platform which facilitates an ongoing set of highest-level business/technology conversations (Quarterly Business Reviews or QBRs) with clients. These discussions drive ongoing updates to a formal IT roadmap, the goal of which is to assist in management decision making and budgeting.
Service Desk
Installation, Maintenance, and Support
Once a good IT roadmap is established, the most critical need is for people who can deliver on the objectives defined and who, most critically, can fully support winery staff in leveraging the solutions implemented.
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Our Grape Squad has been helping wineries with technology for over a decade​. We can physically install systems, proactively and reactively maintain systems, and attentively and responsively handle staff issues on a day-to-day basis. To learn more about our capabilities here, see Support.
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The Grape Squad also supports wineries by ordering hardware, software, and other tech related items for clients. We go through Ingram Micro for most hardware, and we have a variety of other distributors and partners we work with which is growing all the time. For example, several clients expressed interest in being able to legally stream music in their tasting rooms, so we became Pandora CloudCover resellers to be able to help.
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The TCP Core technology we've chosen for our Service Desk is Autotask - what's called a Professional Services Automation system (a PSA). Autotask is the primary system we use to communicate with winery staff about issues they face and to optimize and automate our internal operations.
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Autotask supports converting trouble tickets into hardware and software orders with client approval. In addition, because Autotask is owned by Kaseya, it is tightly integrated with two additional critical parts of our IT Operations: Kaseya 365 Endpoint and Kaseya 365 User. For more detail, see Autotask PSA Software for IT Professionals | Professional Services Automation.
Network
Network Management & Monitoring
The TCP Core technology we've chosen to help us with networks is Auvik. Auvik is an innovative platform which enables MSPs to dynamically map client networks and then use that map as a window into the network, supporting a range of capabilities to manage and backup key network device configurations (firewalls, managed switches, and so on), along with as a robust set of monitoring and alerting features.
​ Auvik includes a particularly useful feature called a "Northstar" diagram which enables the Grape Squad to isolate the network path between any given device (for instance a critical POS terminal) and the Internet, and to dynamically see any issues in that path.
For more detail, watch the great 30 second video here: Best Network Management Software Solution - Auvik Networks
Endpoint
Endpoint Management & Monitoring
An "Endpoint" is a device used by winery staff in their day-to-day lives. Desktop computers, laptops, servers, and mobile devices are typical Endpoints. The TCP Core solution we've adopted here is Kaseya 365 Endpoint (or K365 Endpoint) is a suite of solutions which enable the Grape Squad to secure, backup, manage, and automate maintenance of these devices.
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A few key K365 Endpoint capabilities:
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Ransomware attack behavior monitoring (system or network)
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Windows operating system patch management
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Antivirus deployment and updates
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Remote Endpoint control (for maintenance, training, and direct staff support)
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For more detail, see Kaseya 365 Endpoint: Endpoint Management, Security & Backup
User
User Protection & Security Training
A "User" is a winery staff member (who may or may not have an Endpoint device). The final TCP Core component we've chosen is Kaseya 365 User (K365 User) which includes a range of features to prevent threats, respond to them, and recover from them. Winery staff are protected both when using Endpoint devices and when using "cloud" business platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Dropbox, SalesForce, and so on (Software as a Service or SaaS business systems).
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A few key K365 User capabilities:
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Automatic backup of all corporate email into a searchable archive along with other corporate data (calendars, address books, chat sessions, and so on)
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AI email anti-phishing defense
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Dark web monitoring for user data breaches
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User awareness training, threat simulation and testing
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For more detail, see Kaseya 365 User: User-Targeted Threat Prevention & Recovery
Third-party RMM Portals
Advanced, vendor-specific Capabilities
Beyond our TCP Core solutions, the Grape Squad regularly learns how to navigate third-party RMM portals as our clients introduce us to systems which work best for them. These include portals to Manage & Monitor infrastructure (like RevelGuard) as well as, for instance, portals like SaferPayments where we can use to help our clients maintain their PCI compliance.
