I recently had the pleasure to talk with Jesse Miller from SouthStar Bank about some amazing IT results they were delivering. Southstar Bank, headquartered in Moulton, Texas — about midway between San Antonio and Houston — is a community bank specializing in residential mortgage, real estate and construction lending, operating 15 full-service branches in rural and urban communities across the Central Texas region.

Jesse is an IT Specialist based near Killeen, Texas, and has been with SouthStar Bank for nearly six years. He handles the service desk and endpoint management sides of IT operations, as well as some server administration responsibilities. “We’re a smaller IT staff and I wear a lot of hats, which is typical in the world of community banking.” Jesse shared how he and this team had to really step up to keep everyone productive when COVID forced everyone to work remotely, and he needed a way to realize more 'shift left' results to free up the IT team to focus on key initiatives needed by the bank.

Ivanti Neurons Helps Fix Issues Before Anyone Notices

Jesse and team already had good IT management practices in place and already been delivering solid results with their Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions. But they wanted to make sure they had the resources, access and tools needed to “shift left” faster. For example, not having to escalate nearly as often to higher support levels, but instead discovering and fixing potential issues before things break or anyone notices.

According to Jesse, Ivanti Neurons with its automated workflows is something he and the IT team didn’t know they needed when they needed it. Jesse had attended a virtual webinar and realized how useful it could be to them meeting the challenges from COVID, such as supporting many employees working from home for the first time.

Jesse and team have since realized how Ivanti Neurons truly augments their current solutions — “literally fixing issues before anyone notices,” Jesse said. “Ivanti Neurons has made us more efficient and effective — and has enabled us to do things we didn’t think we could do.”

Jesse explained that it took about 20 minutes to really get up and going with Ivanti Neurons from the time he requested it. “Then the connectors portion was really basic and easy to use,” he said. “I wanted to start getting my data and start watching it flow, including ingesting data from everything else you can use from outside of Ivanti to start pulling in that stuff. That’s the first thing I really started to do to gain greater visibility.”

He continued, “When the pandemic hit, the security front became a huge challenge, and we knew it would be when we had to place many employees out in a space they’ve never been before. How do I pull up on my tablet something I can employ to help folks working from home for the very first time — where I can hit an ‘actions’ button and step through ‘Problems 1 through 5’ I know they’ll encounter and resolve them proactively before employees even know they had them. Those are the kinds of capabilities we were looking for.”

Delivering a “Community-Bank Experience” to All Employees

Jesse said the intelligence delivered by Ivanti Neurons “is as close to real time as you’re going to get.” He added, “We don’t need to interrupt an end-user and their day. We’re giving them a better quality of life. We pride ourselves on that as a community bank; we want to deliver that kind of community experience to employees and customers. It’s what we’re really hoping to accomplish for ourselves and everyone.”

Jesse said every IT department is on a different journey, with different management solutions and use cases across the board. “Concerning Neurons,” he said, “you don’t start with climbing Mt. Everest. You start with areas you’re confident you can conquer, but that you can also test and evaluate and then determine where you can scale from there. And that’s the best part of Neurons. It’s easy to scale.”

He concluded our talk with “How did I not have Neurons earlier? I’m not willing to give it up. I feel other IT departments should definitely give it a shot.”

Watch Jesse’s Complete Interview

Do you want to catch the rest of Jesse’s story? Check out our recorded session The Best Time to Fix an Incident is before it Happens. Jesse talks more about his and the team’s experiences and outcomes, including how they’ve improved the management of all their devices, including remote ones, as well their security posture. You’ll hear how Southstar Bank employees now have better experiences and fewer IT worries, unless it’s the occasional cat walking across their keyboard — at least until there’s an automated workflow that deals with that.