Order out of chaos. (Internet Focus).

Whereas most IT managers have solutions in place to manage their software updates, outside forces are at work to undermine their good work. Chaos is caused within their once stable environments by outside forces such as constant user demand, changing business direction and needs, budget constraints and ever changing technologies. Systems that were designed around client-server architectures for the orderly management of occasional software upgrades cannot cope with a state of constant change.

As it is in the nature of software to constantly change, organisations need to be able to manage this frequent and irregular change as quickly as possible to thousands or even millions of users spread over a large geographic area. Administrators, users and remote support staff find it highly impractical if not outright impossible to stay current at the low bandwidth, intermittent and not always reliable extremities of the network. To overcome these limitations they resort to solutions and processes that are at best inconvenient or at worse expensive and inefficient such as site visits, CD shipment, requiting the roaming users to return to base or undertake a very lengthy dial-up session to try and download the software. Most of these result in unacceptable failures to deliver the change. Real life scenarios such as mergers and acquisitions increase the strain on the administration and IT infrastructure groups bringing in a whole new set of desktops and laptops to manage. This has to be accomplished with a network topology usually very sensitive to the adverse effects of high traffic activities such as software distribution. In other cases such as major new virus hits, the focus is in increasing the reach and speed at which the IT staff try to secure the network and all their systems.

Companies are straggling to get the new security fixes and software updates out rapidly to all their users as soon as a new virus breaks out. The recent Code Red and Nimda attacks showed how important speed is, as they were each responsible for disabling many enterprise computers.

Automating Processes

Due to these problems, the problem of managing software distribution has become more acute.. There are four key processes that desktop and mobile management solutions need to address.

`Packaging' is the process of taking both packaged and bespoke software and certifying and testing it for automated delivery, it is a very time-intensive process with legacy tools.

`Targeting' is the use of policies to specify which groups in an organisation are entitled to use which set of applications and when. It tends to be very labour-intensive using other technologies because, in most cases, targeting requires the manual assignment of software to groups and users.

`Distribution' is the process of delivering software code from a central location across local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) networks and dial-up lines to end-users. It has changed considerably over time with the arrival of virtual private networks (VPNS) and firewalls.

`Reporting and compliance' is the process of dealing with ongoing maintenance. It is often overlooked, but it is vital to ensure that the software has been correctly installed in the first place. Having received the applications, users corrupt their computers or download software from the Internet.

Any organisation with more than a few machines needs to automate these manual and labour-intensive processes, which need to be completed very quickly, with the fewest number of administrators possible.

Systems mismanagement 

The above four processes have traditionally been handled as part of a much wider systems management framework. However, the established systems management software vendors have emerged from the mainframe and client/server eras and many of the architectural assumptions they made on the when they built their product are no longer valid in highly distributed networks, such as those extended by the internet to deliver connected services to mobile employees, business partners, or business to business systems, remote offices and co-located or distributed data centres.

Whereas new features can be added by adding more code to the next software upgrade, a change in architecture requires a heavy investment to rewrite the product, which could take years. Hence the continuing push of these old technologies with a "new face'.

In the client/server era, software only had to be upgraded on more predictable and less frequent cycles, and the endpoints were located on a corporate L/WAN. Now, the frequency of change in the internet enabled computing platforms is near-real time, and may be on a very large scale. These older systems were not designed to handle the volume and frequency of changes and updates.

Most use a proprietary communications protocol, which means that organisations have to lower security policy on their firewall, a huge security risk that many are not willing to take. The so-called `framework solutions' offer wide functionality, but they lack the depth of a specialist or best-of-breed solution developed by companies who specialize in change management. When organisations have a multiplicity of computing devices, managing infrastructure change is difficult, especially in a highly distributed and heterogeneous environment.

For vendors whose core business lies in the development of Network Operating Systems, the tools developed for change management are really only designed to help facilitate the roll-out of their cash-cows, the operating systems and core applications. These are not designed to support the continuous stream of near-real-time change that is the reality of contemporary computing infrastructures that are of a heterogeneous nature. These solutions usually are closely targeted at lowering the immediate total cost of deployment and ownership of the OS and core applications, but not of the whole IT infrastructure, which really is the milestone o judgement.

Implementing a typical software distribution system using a framework or legacy solution can take months or years. A specialist change management system only takes 30-90 days to fully implement and some organisations have received value on a metric scale of days, let alone months, of purchasing a product. Most systems management companies do not have the Internet technology expertise to solve these problems. Similarly, some of the newer Internet companies do not have the depth in infrastructure management to understand what customers actually need.

Internet chaos

When software is deployed over the Internet, the organisation controls the application, but not the end points. It cannot tell customers, employees or business partners which hardware or browser to use and which software to install on its machines. As the advent of the internet transformed the traditional enterprise IT architecture from a centralised design to one that is highly distributed, the ensuing operational environment can in many challenging occasions be described as the `chaos of the Internet'. This move to a distributed environment results in a clear delineation of the limits imposed on old management technologies and methodologies. Marimba's products were developed to allow IT management and administration groups to manage the extended enterprise on either side of the corporate firewall. The solutions are architected to facilitate the task of collecting hardware and software configurations from remote computers, together with the capability of delivering software updates to them in a "worse case scenario' model of an operating environment where the security, bandwidth, reliability and availability of the network cannot be assumed.

The supporting infrastructure has to be robust and highly scalable in order to deal with thousands or perhaps millions of computers. It has also to be bandwidth--efficient as many users may be limited to a slow and unreliable dial-up line, and have secure functionality, since it could be transmitting confidential data over a public infrastructure. These are the problems that modern distributed organisations face, and this system was adopted by enterprises who needed to deploy software to a variety of end-points, such as networking equipment, desktop personal computers, notebook computers, and PDAS, regardless of whether these are within the traditional local area network, across a wide area network, or dialing--in through a modem.

Unchained users

More and more enterprises are buying laptops instead of desktops because they increase the productivity of their staff. LAN centred desktop computers are often centrally managed with little or no end-user involvement. However, users have to be involved in management processes on their laptops, which are only intermittently connected to the network, often over low bandwidth, insecure and unreliable dial-up line. Users have problems if software updates prevent them from working as is the case when the updates fail due to unexpected disconnection or timeouts.

Self service

Many organisations are moving to an automated `self service' concept, which allows users to go to a portal to download the latest packages of software they need, whenever they want to, without IT staff being involved. In other cases, the package delivery my have to be mandatory, such as security updates. A delivery technology which is able to automate both of these processes will inevitably reduce the manual and time intensive administrative overhead because the helpdesk no longer has to receive calls and generate paperwork to get software installed on the users' machines.

The product needs to give users details of the software update and tell them how long it will take them to download even if it is spread over multiple connections or sessions. They need the option to install it immediately or wait until later, even if the end-point is off-line at the time. The change management software also needs to ensure compliance with licenses to avoid piracy.

Bringing order into chaos

Marimba's change management software initiates order by ensuring that all network devices, servers and users, whether desktops, notebooks or PDAS, have the right version of the software at the right time. It means that a company can take a new software security patch, and within a few hours, run through all four processes to ensure that the entire workforce has a secure workstation.

For instance, when the Code Red and Nimda viruses ravaged the internet connected community, companies like Charles Schwab and Deloitte Consulting the United States, managed to deploy all the necessary security fixes across 99% of their desktops and laptops within 24 hours of initial detection, using these products. Change management software helps IT managers to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to their users. In the current economic conditions, reducing cost is the only reason that IT managers are buying software. Management is a significant driver in the reduction of the total cost of ownership of the servers, desktops and laptop computers in the connected and heterogeneous IT environment. Through intelligent automation, it directly reduces the cost of dedicated time spent administering and managing software change, whether this is the initial provisioning, updating or repairing applications across a diversified set of end--points, ranging from laptops to desktops, servers, and a range of new devices It is now obvious that in the long term, the time and personnel costs are much more significant than the hardware and software costs. The cost reduction is effected on "hard" and "soft" cost saving. "Hard' cost reductions are those that are derived from a reduction in tangible operational costs, such as the reduction of costs associated with bandwidth use, software packaging processes, inventory and asset management and other help desk functions. "Soft" cost reductions are those that are indirect results of using the technology, such as removing the need of headcount increases as the IT staff automates time intensive tasks, increased responsiveness of IT infrastructures to changing business needs, lowering the impact of end-user demands, lowering the cost of "inconvenience" and lost opportunity due to unavailable software or machines being tied up for long periods of time and many more.

Many organisations used to limit the number of updates they performed, because they were so difficult and labour--intensive. They are now finding that an automated solution allows them to issue updates more regularly to the benefit of the business. Rather than sending out an update a few times a year, it is now entirely possible to deliver a change frequency approaching that of near-real time. For some organisations that is absolutely critical, because their customer facing staff in the field are only adding as much value to the business as the accuracy and recency of the information available to them.

www.marimba.com

Adrian Rayner, Marimba iNC.