* Security, management vendors challenged to address software-agent situation
Fighting back against software-agent overload
By Denise Dubie
Software agents — long seen as a necessary evil by those securing and managing servers, desktops and other endpoint devices — have proliferated to the point of polluting enterprise environments.
IT managers are fed up with their endpoint devices becoming the dumping ground for bits of vendor code that can slow performance, conflict with services running on the machines and cause huge management headaches when upgrades are needed. Vendors have imposed their agents on customer machines long enough, IT managers say, and the time has come to change how servers and endpoints are secured and managed.
“There are risks in putting too many agents on any one device, so I’ve had to set hard limits on how many agents we send out to our endpoints,” says William Bell, director of information security at CWIE, an Internet-based Web-hosting company in Tempe, Ariz. “Some people will tell you agents are botnets waiting to happen, but if you have ever tried to patch thousands of machines without agents, you know agents have their place. It’s a judgment call.”
Bell is not alone in his efforts to balance the amount of software installed on clients and servers for the sake of securing and managing the machines.
For more on this story, please click here.
Editor’s Note: We regret to let you know that we will no longer be publishing the Networking Technology Update newsletter. To keep you abreast of network technology issues, starting the week of Aug. 13, you will begin receiving the Network/Systems Management newsletter, which mails every Monday and Wednesday. We thank you for supporting Network World newsletters.
