Stories about: Enterprise Management Associates

It took no more than a few cases of miniature, toy flying pigs being handed out at Microsoft's annual management conference in April to dramatize how significantly the company's strategy for building a management platform has changed in the past five years.

Microsoft this week set it sites on becoming a dominant enterprise management vendor, but experts and users say first it will have to define the scope of its goals, improve the platform, and prove it can be the caretaker of non-Windows systems.

Here's a sobering statistic: Eighty per cent of enterprise IT functions are being duplicated by folks outside of the IT department, says Hank Marquis, director of ITSM (IT systems management) consulting at Enterprise Management Associates. In other words, for every 10 people doing IT work as part of their jobs, you've got another eight "shadow IT" staffers doing it on their own.

There are lots of ways business networks can be compromised, and more are developing all the time. They range from technology exploits to social engineering attacks, and all can compromise corporate data, reputation and the ability to conduct business effectively.

There seems to be a holding pattern that many companies fall into, in which their IT assets are:

IBM this week acquired Encentuate and will add that company's single-sign-on technology to its Tivoli line of identity-management and access-management products.

Enterprise Management Associates is back again after a year of absence, this time on a monthly basis. We've really missed your dialog and comments, and hopefully we've been missed as well. As before, this column will focus on network management trends as they fit into the bigger IT management landscape - focusing from time to time on application performance, or SLM versus BSM, or new approaches to asset management, or trends like CMDB adoption as they may affect the NOC.

Virtualization is taking enterprise companies by storm, and ill-prepared IT managers might find themselves struggling against a proliferation of virtual machines (VM), increased configuration complexity and other management issues that come with widely deploying virtual servers.

Rakesh Kumar, an analyst at Gartner. "There is an argument that users [of open source] gain access to a larger skill set than with other platforms," he says, referring to the notion that many eyes debug and look at open-source code.

While rapid-fire cost-savings and consolidation efforts typically dominate an IT executive's annual to-do list, what's getting the green light this year are multiphase projects that protect organizations from regulatory fallout and data leakage.

Virtualization can help IT managers allocate more resources with less hardware, but not without introducing a slew of management challenges.