Managing complexity & achieving security

Hi, my name is Rob Meinhardt. I m CEO and Co-Founder of a company called KACE and I m here to talk to you about a very important topic, which is managing complexity and achieving security.

When you think about complexity on your network, think about complexity on the inside. For the last twenty years, companies have had you focused on the outside dealing with firewall management and managing access control to your network. But there s a devil lurking within here, which is the complexity on your network itself.

All these machines talking to one another, all those machines accessing the internet, all of those machines potentially a point of failure, getting bugs, getting worms, having the inappropriate applications or settings installed. So we re really talking about managing complexity inside the network. And when you talk to people like Gartner, they ll tell you that two to three times the network outages will occur for companies who don t carefully manage their end points and their end nodes, and that s a very important concept for you to understand.

In the mid market especially, companies are dealing with what we call Sneaker Hell. And Sneaker Hell is running around sneaker net, machine to machine, trying to play catch as catch can and make these machines work and be secure and manage them the way that you want them to be managed. And really what you re dealing with is a situation where there s TNT sitting there and that situation can explode at any point in time.

This leads to incredible security problems. It leads to frustrated users, which is a key point and it also leads to another important concept, which is—especially for your IT managers out there—exhausted IT staff, people playing catch up all the time and not getting to the interesting projects that really make a difference for your business.

What you really need to think about as an IT manager today is how do I achieve automation nirvana. And automation nirvana includes a number of different steps that need to be taken on your network. The first thing you have to do no matter what is understand what you have, how many machines, how are they configured, what applications are there and where are the potential pitfalls that you need to address. Once you have that information, you re armed to take action on your network, deploying new applications, deploying patches, updating applications. You now have the ability to control your environment by deploying scripts and setting policies and enforcing those on all the machines on your network.

You have a requirement set on you by management to secure your network, track for vulnerabilities, assess those problems, remediate them and in some cases quarantine machines. You also have a requirement to report on this entire piece of infrastructure and all the activities that you re doing so people know that you re doing your job and you re getting things done.

The problem with automating this entire process is that you have to do every single one of these tasks. You ve got to do it across every single node. And more importantly—and this is what gets you on the sneaker net perspective is you got to do it forever. The problem never goes away and that defines a situation where automation is critical.

So when you re thinking about getting this job done on your network you re probably faced with three or four different choices. First, you have the opportunity to throw more people at the problem. Well, that s an expensive proposition and you know they re always going to be playing catch up. You also have an opportunity to purchase software. There are a lot of different providers out there and you got to integrate them together to get the reporting infrastructure that you re going to want. You have appliance players out there, who have all in one type of solutions that can get you up and running very quickly and get you in control of your network. And then finally, you have the opportunity to outsource. That s a situation where you re putting control of your network in the hands of someone else and making it their problem.

So the choice is really yours. You got to take a look at all four of these options to figure out which one works best for you.