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Aug. 26, 2010

IBM will soon offer new software to deliver improved security and compliance to laptops, PCs, workstations and servers, automating some of the most time-intensive security tasks for most of its global customers.

The new enterprise software, delivered through IBM's recently closed BigFix acquisition, provides built-in intelligence that identifies all of a company's PCs, laptops, servers, POS (point-of-sale) and virtualized devices and then flags when those pieces of equipment aren't in full compliance with corporate IT standards.

IBM's software features a single dashboard that makes the proper fixes across 500,000 machines in just a few minutes.

Companies can see, detect, change, enforce and report on security policies and system configurations of all endpoint devices and in real time, including those not continuously connected to the corporate network, or those that reside in a totally different segment of an enterprise network.

"As companies become increasingly more complex and operate in so many different times zones, virtualized and distributed, it's extremely critical for them to take proactive steps to better secure and manage all their IT environment in a consolidated and automated way," said Amrit Williams, CTO of BigFix technology at IBM.

He added "With BigFix's new virtualization and interface breakthroughs, IT staff anywhere can better manage and secure their IT environments."

Another big improvement is a new role-based graphic user interface. The redesigned GUI now includes role-specific views so that IT staff can better view the real status of IT assets according to key functional areas such as endpoint management, security, audit compliance, server log verification, provisioning or IT operations.

Having role-based views helps optimize workflows and simplify the IT staff's experience by a great deal.

Upgrading BigFix deployments to version 8.0 requires no server or PC reboots and customers can upgrade as fast as their change control allows, unlike other management infrastructures which require multiple migration upgrades.

IBM's new software can also help accelerate clients' migrations to Windows 7 operating system. To help leverage IBM's global reach, BigFix software has general availability today in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese.

BigFix also supports more than 70 various operating systems including SUSE, HP-UX, RHE and CentOS, adding to the 70 current operating system variants already supported across Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux.

The availability of new BigFix Unified Management Software Platform includes more than 200 customer and partner-specific enhancements.

A major competitive differentiator of the new BigFix platform is its display of all virtual and physical assets in a single view to help locate, manage and protect virtualized and physical systems.

IBM announced the close of the BigFix acquisition on July 20, 2010.

Overall, BigFix adds a whole new set of highly acclaimed management technologies to the IBM software portfolio. The BigFix platform is used by organizations in government, finance, retail, educational, science, computer science, industrial and public utility sectors.

BigFix software greatly facilitates IT infrastructure management by replacing fragmented collections of single-purpose tools with the industry's only unified visibility and control architecture that consolidates up to eighteen security, IT compliance, decision support and green computing functions.

Source: International Business Machines.

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