Company: Utopic Software
Company Description: Utopic Software helps companies overcome the challenges associated with change, configuration, and compliance management of servers, desktops, mobile devices, cloud computing and virtualized environments. Founded in 2014, ee provide powerful and automated self-healing solutions to better control the fluid and changing IT environment through recovery, repair, migration, backup and imaging.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Software
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Systems Management Solution

Nomination Title: Utopic Software’s Persystent Suite

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

The model for system management best practices is continually in flux as a result from evolving needs against aggressive security threats, misconfigurations, and unintentional or unauthorized changes to the system. This creates an unremitting challenge to more proactively manage the lifecycle of a device through the perpetuation of an approved ideal state and the reduction of break/fix incidents. Utopic’s Persystent Suite provides an automated and effective means to maintain control over the lifecycle through its unique and proprietary ability to “self-heal” PCs. The solution facilitates repair and recovery of compromised or misconfigured devices in near real-time and without manual intervention with a single reboot of a device.

Originally conceived as an imaging product, Utopic Software acquired the Persystent technology in 2013, and completely revised, innovated and advanced its capabilities as a repair and recovery solution. It was reintroduced in May 2014. As such, it became a powerful system management suite. It includes the original imaging capabilities and added the unique ability to apply corrective action to a device whether it’s on or off the network. It also provides automated and centralized configuration management, DoD-standard secure wipe/disk erasure, easy migration capabilities (for updates and patches), as well as granular reporting for compliance enforcement. Most importantly, it self-heals any machine back to an ideal state.

Unlike any other solution on the market it as part of a pre-boot process once the system BIOS has loaded. Traditional solutions don’t apply images before the OS loads) This means, no matter how corrupted the operating system was before shut down, Persystent loads a fresh and approved version. It does this without affecting users’ data, and accomplishes the feat faster than any solution on the market-in about 45 seconds. It doesn’t roll back to Day Zero, but rather, to the last approved image with updates controlled by IT. Essentially, it takes IT and support services out of the “reimaging business.” In a paradigm of expecting IT to do more with less, Persystent eliminates up to 70% of break-fix issues. With so many potential issues affecting critical systems, from user errors to malware infections to poor patching to catastrophic failures (“blue screen of death’) IT departments constantly need to reimage machines from scratch or spend countless hours troubleshooting and repairing. Consider a single instance of malware typically affects 200-300 individual files. As Persystent removes 2+ hours of repair, recovery and reimage time with a single reboot, IT departments can reprioritize resources. It promotes a culture of proactivity that not only extends the lifecycle of the device, but enforces multiple compliance requirements (most notably the demonstration of control over the continuous integrity of all network assets—SANS Critical Controls).

Gartner says more than 40% of all mission-critical IT service outages are due to people and process errors, with a significant number of those due to a lack of coordination between change, release and configuration management. Compound that with the consistent barrage of user inflicted errors and silent breach attacks the need for self-healing becomes the best and most cost effective option for Level One support. By regulating systems management with a self-heal component, auto imaging for updates and seamless means to push any authorized changes across the enterprise, Persystent helps companies achieve the desired5-9’s (99.999% availability), there is a thin line to ensure less than 5 ½ minutes of downtime a year.

As a repair recovery solution, Persystent’s automatic break/fix through reboot to ideal state solves more than 34% of all inbound calls without manual intervention.

As an imaging solution, it reduces repair and update costs and downtime by 70%; files move in the background; push authorized changes on and offline.

As a change management offering, Persystent improves success rate with patching (up to 90%); significantly reduces do-overs, troubleshooting and desk side visits.

And as a configuration and compliance solution it automatically prevents or resolves the majority of issues that lead to either degraded performance or outage.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 150 words).

• Repair and recover malware-infected or otherwise inoperable systems in 45 seconds with simple reboot
• Self-heal services, process, files, apps and registry levels on or off the network; autonomously to prevent unauthorized changes
• Corrective action against OS properties only-doesn't affect user data, honors NFTS
• Centrally managed, reduces operational costs by automating manual platform configuration tasks
• Includes DoD-standard secure wipe functionality.
• Applies ideal image during pre-boot process (after BIOS)
• Supports BitLocker encryption
• Update images on your schedule; when new snapshot of image is applied, only what has changed is adjusted
• Single file repository: saves only one version of an application for the enterprise
• Multiple levels of repair: high/medium/low- company can categorize or choose a la carte what to repair on a system.