IT and business align around rules and patterns
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Aligning technology and business â what a concept. Everyone is talking about it, but to put things in perspective, I imagine the day after the wheel was invented the wife of the inventor got sick and tired of watching her husband roll it down the hill all day. She probably said, âCyxny, honey, why donât you make another one and put them on the cart?â
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According to some industry analysts, as many as 90 percent of all enterprise businesses currently assign oversight of anti-virus technologies to their desktop management teams, rather than ceding the work to security specialists.The reasons behind this fact are simple, market watchers maintain, as the process of keeping AV agents up-to-date, distributing new virus signatures to end points, and monitoring PC configurations for anomalies are exactly the types of tasks that IT operations teams are expected to carry out.If you add in the fact that many companies are looking at their IT security and management functions from the perspective of handling regulatory compliance demands, experts say, it becomes clear how much commonality exists between the security and management camps.As such, it should come as no surprise that a growing number of organizations are beginning to view much of their traditional security work -- in specific chores that don't involve warding off attacks -- from a systems management standpoint.That's the reason why security market leader Symantec plunked down $830 million for management software vendor Altiris in Jan. 2007, and why so many IT management technology providers are dipping their toes in the security waters, said Neil MacDonald, analyst with researcher firm Gartner."In most cases clients are looking to reduce complexity and costs, and improve overall systems manageability; today it's very hard to configure and manage security products made by multiple vendors, so we're seeing this trend toward what you might call Darwinistic operationalization," MacDonald said.Based on the growing management headaches created by the presence of so many security tools in the modern enterprise, businesses are looking for ways to centralize oversight of the various technologies and hand off their control to operational specialists, the analyst said.That is why Symantec and McAfee are pushing expanded management capabilities, and why so many companies with management backgrounds -- such as BigFix, Kace, and LanDesk -- are now actively marketing their security skills, MacDonald said."This is a very important trend, because most security issues actually arise in systems management, and even if you love Symantec and are on a path to acquire their various products, there's a pretty good chance that you'd at least consider the security solutions being offered by these other providers coming from more of an operational side," the analyst said."These companies on the operational side will definitely come head-to-head with the security companies, and really, that's a good thing for everyone," MacDonald said. "Because the endgame is that users should end up with more integrated functionality at a lower price."Of course, major IT systems management platform providers including CA, EMC, IBM, and Microsoft are also competing in the security market, and are doing so with increasing success based on their management skills, the analyst said."If a security person can do a better job by using management applications, and vice versa, then why not; even though these companies look at things through a different lens, there's a great amount of value in eliminating duplication of tasks such as inventory management," MacDonald said. "All the management vendors have a great case to make; convergence may be too strong of a word, but there will certainly be increased integration across security and operations-type applications."Strategy leaders at Symantec agreed that the confluence of security and systems management is seemingly unavoidable, especially as each of the processes becomes so much a part of the other.The shift is the primary reason why the massive AV and systems defense company was compelled to make such a significant investment in management expertise through its buyout of Altiris, executives said."When we looked at this area and how we wanted to approach the market, we saw management as changing the entire game right now because of a number of factors," said Tim Brown, senior director of architecture and strategy for Symantec."The bar for management has risen in the last few years with issues such as virtualization placing a heavier demand for coordination between security and management," Brown said. "We really needed to become a leader in both disciplines and offer a consistent fashion through which customers can manage and remediate their systems in a tightly integrated way."Symantec has been helping companies manage compliance issues for a decade, Brown noted, but alerting customers to problems that auditors might find is no longer enough, he contends, because users are also asking the vendor to provide the mechanisms necessary to remediate any issues it finds.Emerging technologies such as network access control (NAC) that involve everything from testing systems configuration to updating AV tools won't be as broadly adopted by end-users if vendors such as Symantec can't offer the ability to cover both the security and management tasks they require, the executive said.Leaders of systems management companies such as LanDesk echo Symantec's observation that their products are increasingly becoming the tools through which customers handle a great deal of security work."Many of our customers are having a hard time differentiating between systems and security management as so much of what they do to secure the device is around traditional systems management work," said Steve Daly, who took over as general manager at LanDesk at the beginning of 2007."Customers are looking for tools that give them a view into inventory, the known state of their systems, to do the remediation and bring everything into compliance, which is really the traditional realm of systems management," Daly said. "They're talking about moving to service management, but the reality is that they're caught up being reactive in break-fix mode; they want to move into more of an over-arching process focus, and that's driving a philosophical change for IT and how we deliver our products."Those factors are the very reason that a systems management specialists such as LanDesk was pushed to launch its maiden host intrusion protection system (HIPs) earlier this year, Daly said."Our opportunity comes from being able to lock down the device and watch the device and defend it in a preemptive manner, versus after an attack hits the device," Daly said. "I think it will be more of a challenge for the Symantecs of the world to build a single client that covers both security and management, coming from their side of the business."Other management technology vendors said that they have long considered security as one of their core strengths, even if they didn't market their products as such.Marty Kacin, co-founder and chief technology officer at systems management appliance vendor Kace, said that midsize companies have been approaching the issue from a more unified standpoint for years, and that enterprises are merely beginning to follow suit in viewing the issues together.Along with covering issues of inventory and systems image provisioning, Kace's appliances provide features including security patch distribution and desktop vulnerability assessment."We've never differentiated security from management from the get-go, yet we never marketed around security until recently when it became clear that this was a message that resounds with customers," Kacin said. "And really when you think about it, it's not just that patching and configuration management relate to security, the issue is that the processes of systems management and security are fundamentally interdependent."Companies such as BigFix, which has marketed itself as a security and management vendor for some time, claim that their existing business models illustrate the very approach that enterprises must take when approaching the individual strategies."When your job is to sit on the end point and tell it how it needs to look and behave, it's clear that we're ideally suited to tackle both of these problems from a management perspective," said Greg Toto, vice president of products and operations at BigFix."CIOs are annoyed with the volume, complexity and integration issues driven by the use of all these security and management point products in unison," Toto said. "The value proposition of a company like ours is to provide control for a broad range of these agents via a single management console."
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Simplifying operations and saving money were the two themes heard often among IT managers  who talked about adopting JBoss middleware applications within their businesses at the JBoss World show in Orlando.
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The world of information technology is not immune from the reaches of the urban legend.
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A host of new products are designed to work and compete with leading enterprise management products, the company says. By Darrell Dunn.
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InfoWorld - According to some industry analysts, as many as 90 percent of all enterprise businesses currently assign oversight of anti-virus technologies to their desktop management teams, rather than ceding the work to security specialists.
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A host of companies led by Microsoft (Quote, Chart) and Intel has revised and released a specification for making sure computer systems have a common way to communicate.
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The enterprise software company strikes a sizeable deal to get back on track.
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The growth in data on company networks will pose challenges for IT managers in security, regulatory compliance and business processes, said IDC.
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European security experts working on plans for a system to notify small and midsize businesses of IT security threats.
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From the 1950&#39;s until the present, one of the dominant companies in the world&#39;s computer industry. Offers a variety of data processing hardware systems, system and application software, and information technology services.
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Pouring fuel on the debate over whether IT provides a competitive advantage to corporations, a pair of prominent industry observers Monday offered starkly different views of the role computer technology can play in transforming business strategy.
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Today's corporations need to bend without breaking. Agile IT operations can deliver products and services promptly, and then they can update and improve and reconfigure those resources as need be. But only good management practices will keep it all working together. In this Executive Briefing, we'll look at best practices for providing and managing IT in an on-demand world.
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The importance these days of protecting your business from security threats is clear. But how to do it well often remains a vexing problem. Major IT vendors have faced this challenge like everyone else -- but with a twist. As providers of security technology and IT systems vulnerable to threats, they've had to stay a step ahead of everyone else. That's why CIOs of technology stalwarts IBM and Intel and security technology provider Symantec have taken on security management as one of their key functions. All three companies have shared their lessons learned with InfoWorld.These CIOs have had to do more than take on the usual responsibility for driving their respective companies' efforts to defend their infrastructure, employees, and corporate reputations from any fallout related to data breaches or compliance violations. They've also had to be the in-house beta testers for a generation of new technologies their organizations hope to sell to customers. This balancing act demands more of their time and energy now than at any other point in their careers, all of the executives said.Security affects all of it "When I look at the risks here at Symantec, I know that we have to maintain a multilayered approach to protecting our IT assets: our ERP data, intellectual property, customer data, and personnel data. Managing the risk around all of that is a significant responsibility for me and my team," said David Thompson, CIO at Symantec."We have multiple large pools of information that are critical to our organization, and we're seeing more of that data move further toward the boundaries, toward the end points," he said. "My job is getting more data into the hands of our business units, but that creates a lot of risk in terms of where it goes, who has access to it, and what they are using it for, along with the risk of it being exposed."Even Thompson, who ranks his ability to "eat Symantec's own cooking" -- or use all of its security and compliance technologies -- as a huge advantage compared to CIOs working in other firms, admits that trying to keep up with all of the threats and regulations, as well as all the new products, is an effort that can become all-consuming.The key to staying ahead of the attacks and laws, while not spending too much of his time focused on security, is delegating to a strong team of experts and prioritizing which projects to tackle based on their criticality to Symantec's business. "As a business leader and IT executive, if you take the view of trying to fix everything, you'll never sleep a wink. You have to assess risks, and just as we'll never be able to completely secure our borders in the United States, you have to prioritize efforts to reduce risk as much as possible," Thompson said. "CIOs themselves must have a team that can help carry a good portion of the load so that they can stay focused on business relationships, clearing roadblocks, and being the public face of that team."Among the most critical roles that any CIO or technology executive must play in aiding the efforts of their security staff is to drive high-level assessments of risk and figure out how their companies must strategize to complete projects that address the most significant threats and compliance regulations, Thompson contended. The most effective strategy, he noted, is to determine which projects most readily address specific threats or government requirements and focus on them, he said. Otherwise, a broad-brush approach to security will lead to unnecessary complexity and eat up all of your time. Thompson also noted that even with the latest security technology available to him, the security strategy is more important than just having good security tools.At IBM, CIO Mark Hennessy also stressed the importance of delegating to his team of security experts and of conducting near-constant risk assessment. But even with that delegation, security remains a top focus for him, he said. "The world is changing, and there are a lot of new realities around security to address. Fostering stronger security across the board is a core tenet, as it helps to bring more value to everything we do," he said. "We want to make our employees more comfortable and more productive, and drive greater success for the clients we serve, so it's something we constantly need to remain focused on," he added.The security-vs.-complexity challenge Malcolm Harkins, general manager of Intel's Information Risk and Security unit, works directly with the chip giant's CIO Douglas Busch on issues of internal operational security and compliance. Harkins said that one of the biggest challenges that organizations such as Intel face is the process of improving security in the face of rapidly advancing IT complexity.On top of that, ongoing efforts to lower the total cost of securing a company the size of Intel -- while keeping up with emerging threats and regulations -- is driving the firm to seek greater standardization in some areas, and to integrate larger groups of technologies in others. "We currently have over 40 individual security software and hardware providers that we are doing business with, and that's a lot of different pieces to have to integrate," Harkins said. "It's almost crazy from an IT standpoint, so we want to employ greater levels of standardization to help us with issues of consistency; we'll always have a very heterogeneous environment, but we really need a more consistent set of tools. The more standardization you have, the easier it is to make things more secure."One of the most crucial steps any company can take in terms of improving its security is driving understanding of the attacks and laws across their highest executive ranks and ensuring that leaders who become involved in matters of security maintain realistic goals and objectives, Harkins said.But that does not mean being heavy-handed in terms of the security levels demand, he noted. C-level executives who take an extremely conservative approach and desire to aggressively lock down all their IT systems may in fact do more harm than good, he said. "Some companies believe that by severely limiting the use of technologies that pose risks, they are improving their defenses, but the truth is they may just be creating a false sense of security," Harkins said."In reality, they are limiting the ability of their business to operate effectively and are increasing risk by creating barriers and policies that can't be enforced practically," he said. In IT, "you have to work with [C-suite] to change their approach from one that is focused on responding to fears to one that is focused on key controls that solve real problems. You have to have executive buy-in, but by taking the wider approach of considering legal, compliance, and security issues together, you will end up with stronger protection, lower costs, and less complexity."
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Symantec's primary strategy in the enterprise may currently revolve around the notion of IT risk management, but the company's latest research finds that efforts to refine corporate process unrelated to security technology have become just as popular with customers moving to limit their exposure.
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The software maker says the time has come to offer business software in versions that are both hosted and not hosted.
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A small company learns to think big -- meeting the needs of its enterprise-class customers -- by building an infrastructure it can count on.