Altiris announcements reflect the convergence of management and security

Altris product announcements illustrate three systems management trends

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Last week, Altiris was kind enough to fly me to its user group meeting, called ManageFusion, in Orlando, so I could participate in a panel discussion on virtualization and meet lots of happy Altiris users and product people. I was also on hand for three announcements that closely reflect three significant systems management trends that EMA is seeing.

The first announcement was the introduction of a security offering, the Altiris Client Security Management Suite. This provides some key client security capabilities that leverage the asset and configuration knowledge of Altiris' other products, such as:

* Locking out USB devices or Wi-Fi connections in specific network situations (e.g. at an Internet café, but not on the corporate network).

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Last week, Altiris was kind enough to fly me to its user group meeting, called ManageFusion, in Orlando, so I could participate in a panel discussion on virtualization and meet lots of happy Altiris users and product people. I was also on hand for three announcements that closely reflect three significant systems management trends that EMA is seeing.

The first announcement was the introduction of a security offering, the Altiris Client Security Management Suite. This provides some key client security capabilities that leverage the asset and configuration knowledge of Altiris' other products, such as:

* Locking out USB devices or Wi-Fi connections in specific network situations (e.g. at an Internet café, but not on the corporate network).

* Implementing granular security permissions based on context (e.g. to allow full administrator rights, but still prevent malicious software installation).

* Ensuring sensitive data that is written to external media is always encrypted.

This reflects the convergence of management and security that EMA has been highlighting for some time, a trend that shows up in messaging and products from several vendors including Configuresoft, Tripwire, Cambia, and others. Such vendors take the approach that a tightly managed system is a well-secured system, and the new features from Altiris reflect this ethos. Such approaches blend key values of client system manageability with critical requirements for endpoint security - including control and audit of the data accessed from, used by, and often stored on these client systems.

The second announcement was the availability of a new Managed Service Provider program, including solutions for both remote provisioning and remote assistance. This reflects a trend EMA is seeing, where midsize businesses especially are looking for alternative, simpler delivery channels for management capabilities.

I recently wrote in this column about the benefits of appliance-based products - such as Kace's KBOX, the Xceedium Gatekeeper, Levanta's Intrepid M, and the Citrix Branch Office Appliance. Like these appliances, "on-demand" services (such as management services from Altiris, Everdream, and WebEx; or application services like Salesforce.com) are particularly attractive for midsized businesses, for many of the same reasons. They skip the often difficult, costly, complex, and time-consuming implementation effort, and often provide a better value experience for SMBs.

The third announcement was a significant shift in Altiris' message, from a product set focused on lifecycle management, to a cohesive solution focused on business service. Altiris calls this "service-oriented management," a new (and, in my opinion, redundant) term that Altiris uses to describe business service management (made popular especially by BMC Software and IBM), or IT service management (a more widely-used term arising from the IT Infrastructure Library).

While I dislike the redundant terminology, I do like the direction, which reflects a third important trend - the increasing awareness, among both software vendors and enterprise IT departments, that technology must connect with real business outcomes, and prove specific relevance to business goals. This shift - from component to suite, from product to solution, from technology to business - is one that all technology people must continue to embrace.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.