Directories are driving secure desktops

By Steve Barrie 16 Sep 2003 | IT-Director.com, special to SearchWebServices.com

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Market Analysis

Directories are driving secure desktops
There is a massive overlap when managing distributed desktops within the LAN. This has come about because of a changing emphasis within this environment from pure cost-saving towards the provision of identity-based security. It is difficult, now, to know whether managing desktops is actually about enhancing performance and availability or just about controlling the facilities that are available to the users.

Back in the old days, when Microsoft first brought out LAN Manager and then SMS, the great gain with LAN management products was in reducing downtime and travel expenses. Everything was built around the remote control concept that allowed the PC Support Team to connect to desktops in far away places and fix problems without having to travel long distances. The result was more problems fixed more quickly and much greater user productivity.

Products like Microsoft SMS, Novell ManageWise (now ZENworks) and LANDesk added all sorts of clever features to enable inventory management and software distribution. LAN management was looking a lot like its enterprise equivalents. It was Intel that drove the 'Wired for Management' (WfM) initiatives. This put event monitoring capabilities onto motherboards and added interfaces between desktop hardware and management software. WfM led to a spate of OEM-created management solutions, such as IBM's Netfinity management tools.

However, it was Novell that started the identity-based management approach. At the heart of all that it does is Novell's directory technology. This allows just about anything to have its own identity and individual profile. All of the information relating to a single component is held in one logical record, which makes it very easy to manage. All that is required is for the relationships between resources to be defined and a strong management picture results.

Using this approach has the great advantage of locking down exactly who has access to which applications. Which desktops are capable of executing particular business processes and so on. Secure operation almost falls out of the architecture as a by-product of the management solutions. This lockdown capability was a feature that Microsoft had been working on within the Windows authorization processing but the advent of its own directory technology changed all that.

Soon we will see Microsoft SMS 2003. The Beta release has been in test for a while now and it builds on the Active Directory foundation that is to be found everywhere within the Microsoft infrastructure. This centralised point of management provides strong inventory management; software license metering and much improved staged software distribution. This will all form a part of the Microsoft System Center, which will acts as a unified interface for combining SMS 2003, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM 2004) and future products from the Enterprise Management Division.

All of the big LAN management names, including LANDesk, are working on directory-driven management solutions. The big bonus they are getting is that they have a powerful security message to sell. However, this is no one-way street. As an alternative we see that there are security products that are looking at the possibility of entering the LAN management market. Cybersight, for example, is very good at noticing change within a LAN configuration. Its architecture lends itself to most management capabilities and, already, these are being introduced. Network Associates has all sorts of management capabilities hidden away in its portfolio.

Whilst traditional LAN management tools have not strayed into the detection of unauthorized changes - viruses, trojans etc. - the opposite is not true. Could the security solutions force their way into a competitive landscape with Microsoft, Novell and LANDesk? I'd like to think that they could.

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