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"Integration across security and management makes IT more productive"
 Tim Sinclair is general manager, Windows Enterprise Management, Microsoft. He spoke with Network Computing’s Anoop K Menon on how Microsoft’s System Center family of products build on the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and help manage and optimize complex IT environments.
In the management space you have been investing for nearly five years to build a broad management product line. Where do things stand today?
Our management product line for enterprises, called System Center, is essentially a series of products like System Center Configuration Manager (to be launched soon), System Center Operations Manager (called MOM earlier) and System Center Essentials.
System Center Configuration Manager looks after configuration management, patch distribution, software distribution, asset inventory discovery and management. System Center Operations Manager does an end-to-end server monitoring. For example, if you have a Web site that has an HTML or an ASP page running on a Web server or IIS which is connected to a database, System Center Operations Manager is able to see all of those elements. With the help of management packs, it can monitor network devices as well as third party applications like SAP and Oracle. System Center Essentials, targeted at midsize companies, packs in all the broad features that bigger enterprises are using, including software distribution, asset management, patch management, understanding configuration and monitoring alerts.
How does the System Center fit in with Microsoft’s much broader DSI?
Security is very much a part of DSI because security needs to be dynamic enough to spot issues when they crop up, and smart enough to fix those issues. DSI started originally as a management initiative—get smarter configurations, do smarter monitoring, make sure you have virtual situations so that you can virtualize some servers and keep others physical. When you add the security element into it and use the word dynamic, you imply intelligence. The intelligence needs to be sorted into server, client and edge layers. Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) 2007 has that smartness. For example, through its granular authorization policy and integration of workflow logic, IAG can be configured to make users aware of possible contraventions of policy mid-session.
When they find a problem, most IT support staff try to figure out how to troubleshoot it, fix it and walk away. When that problem recurs, the next person has to again address the problem, try to troubleshoot it and fix it. You could put that information into a series of rules and create a wizard that checks if a problem has been dealt with earlier, and if so, suggests remedial action. In IT, the same things happen a lot of times. We only need to capture and codify that knowledge so that people need not re-learn the same things.
Could you revisit the recent Forefront Client Security launch and explain how security fits into DSI?
Forefront manages end-to-end security right from the edge to the server to the client. At the edge, which is the first level of defense, we have IAG 2007 to control access to applications and the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006, which serves as a firewall against Internet-based threats. At the server level, we have Forefront Server Security to protect applications like the Exchange server and the SharePoint server against viruses, worms, spam, etc. Our recently launched Forefront Client Security works at the client level, protecting desktops, laptops and server operating systems from viruses, spyware and other malware.
How do you capture and re-use that knowledge?
Let me use System Center Operations Manager as an example. Knowledge is captured in an XML format and the IT professional or the vendor can author it. For instance, Cisco or EMC will have knowledge about their products, how they are controlled, what the alerts are, etc. This information is captured in ‘health models’ and put into a management pack, which is installed in Operations Manager. When a problem arises, the operator sees one consistent view and is able to address it directly from the event’s knowledge window. The same is true for business applications too—you can write an application that has knowledge embedded in it and that could be a portion of a management pack that is understood by the Operations Manager. The XML format allows for new features to be included directly in knowledge documents.
At Microsoft, we added a management pack for clients in System Center Operations Manager and tested it for our infrastructure management. We have 70,000 employees with an average of 2 PCs per employee. How do we know the uptime of PCs, especially critical PCs? To find out, we added a management pack on Vista in Operations Manager. Anytime an error was thrown up, the facility mapped it with this new rich format, allowing us to preempt a wide variety of threats. For instance, if the disk drives are almost full, or have specific errors, or the memory is low…you would want IT to fix the system before it deteriorates, else you may lose data. Now a lot of people don’t back up their data regularly, therefore if the help desk is able to call you and let you know that things are about to go bad, that’s a great example of proactive IT as opposed to a reactive one.
What’s your personal take on putting management solutions and security solutions on a single platform?
I think it all boils down to more agility, lower cost and less complexity for the IT person. Monitoring several different consoles, which are not integrated at the core level, (that is, the information level) makes IT prone to committing mistakes. The management pack tackles core level integration. Integration across security and management realms will make IT far more productive. Look at it the other way—if you have a whole bunch of point products, you need to have many more people to be more secure.
What are the new announcements that we can expect on the System Center front?
You can expect a System Center Configuration Manager announcement this month. An exciting product we have is Virtual Machine Manager, which will allow you to manage virtual machines at the server level, providing greater efficiency in hardware utilization and management of physical and virtual assets. Data Protection Manager will enable you to back up all client machines and server applications, as well as your data.
Next year, we will be releasing System Center Service to automate IT service management. It is a sort of ERP for IT.
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