There is a battle underway for control of the enterprise desktop, a battle that will wage horizontally across security and operations. Centralized management and agent integration will define the winners as enterprises look for greater control over what has been a disparate set of desktop technologies.
Historically desktop support has had to worry about 2 and in some cases 3 agents that require central administration and management – that is they are dynamic in nature and require consistent updates or periodic configuration changes. Centralized management, although important, has not driven the need for a single or reduced set of agents until recently. The past 1.5 to 2 years has seen a significant change in the threat landscape, and an increase in regulatory pressures, requiring business to deploy a minimum of 3 but usually more separate security and operations technologies, such as antivirus, anti-spyware, personal firewall, host-based intrusion prevention, NAC or policy enforcement, encryption (for laptops mostly), content monitoring and filtering (or extrusion prevention), vulnerability management, patch management (different than VM but that is a different post), software distribution, configuration management, policy compliance, and others. How does this complex set of technologies become simplified? Well, simplicity involves two major processes: eliminating redundant elements and integrating disparate elements into a common work-flow or process.
Although traditionally agnostic or at least accepting of shared desktop real-estate, traditional security vendors will push into operational aspects of desktop support and traditional operations vendors will provide more security-oriented capabilities. They will all market integrated, centrally managed agents or a single agent, that promise to address a broad-set of functions.
Best-of breed battles will be fought but not won. Emerging threats and the dynamic nature of business and technical innovation will create a need for new desktop solutions, but the companies that offer the broadest set of security and operations functions will win the war for the desktop. One agent to rule them all and through a console bind them! I will leave it up to the reader to define which vendors represent Sauron and which ones represent the fellowship.
Of course we could just go back to a thin-client architecture leveraging enterprise applications delivered through web services, producing an 80% or more reduction in security issues and significant reductions in costs…but that level of elegant simplicity would just be silly.
[...] I have truly enjoyed my time as a Gartner analyst working with some of the brightest and most eclectic folks in the industry, but life is about progression and I have accepted the position of CTO at BigFix. The architecture and technology that we have at Bigfix, the scalability that is offered, coupled with the changes in the industry, which I have talked about (here) , (here), and (here), made it clear that this is a great opportunity and one I could not pass up. [...]
[...] Well AV becomes part of a converged security client, offering multiple capabilities including anti-spyware, personal firewall, and intrusion prevention as the foundation, which I have talked about (here). Of course this has already begun and the AV guys are shoving more and more technologies onto the desktop, including data leak prevention, end-point policy enforcement, patch and configuration management. They bundle it under some uber-agent, while the individual executables are fighting to claim your system resources. They offer some half-baked management console, slap a new coat of paint on some recent acquisitions, and complain anytime Microsoft attempts to improve their security if it in anyway affects their sacred AV cash cow. [...]
[...] a blog post entitled “One agent to rule them all and through a console bind them” (here) in which I discussed the evolution of desktop management technologies and the convergence of [...]
[...] is driving the convergence of systems and security management I have been espousing (here) and (here). Systems and PC life-cycle management technologies will converge with endpoint protection [...]