Systems Management - The Status Quo isn't working

Warning: Bold claims within!

OK, let me give you some background first.

If you read my post about what you don’t know about systems management might kill you, you know I’ve been very focused on systems management for quite some time. Having seen several generations of tools and processes, I wanted to share some best practices.

Whether you are evaluating, deploying, optimizing or scanning your logs in a desperate attempt at remediation you are probably seeing at least one of these conditions:

Architecture health is < 100%

If the platform is not healthy, your site infrastructure won’t be either. If your sites are not healthy, you can’t manage end points. If you can’t manage end points, you can’t do anything.

You have more > 1 deployment process

When I see more than a single hardware-independent deployment or provisioning process, I think of the good ol’ XP and Vista days. When I think about Windows Vista, I get angry. You don’t want to make me angry – and you don’t want to update more than one disk image or task sequence.

Are you leveraging offline servicing to keep your disk images up-to-date?

Patch compliance is < 98%

You simply cannot afford anything less. Sure, the number is arbitrary. But the process know-how to get to a high performance metric and back it up with analytics will help drive your protection and threat mitigation strategy to a high maturity. That’s what you want, by the way :)

It takes more than 5 minutes to produce actionable asset intelligence

Do you get drop-by’s from Really Important People who want to know “how many copies of Adobe Acrobat Pro are installed, which version and are they being used?” Do you panic at the invisible complexity no one else sees and doesn’t think about. If you can’t produce results on demand, there’s something out of best practice.

If you’d like more information about how we approach systems management at ITS, you can grab a copy of our newest insights whitepaper at the company website. If you’d like to learn more about the new ConfigMgr-as-a-Service offering from my team please let us know here.