A Service Automation Approach to Client Management

Your IT infrastructure and a cable television system have a lot in common:

• Both deliver services from a central location to a large population of users.
• Both have a central transmitting facility and many geographically dispersed and widely disparate receivers.
• Both deliver a variety of services. The cable television system can provide high-speed Internet and telephone services, in addition to television programming. The IT infrastructure delivers a variety of business services, such as online ordering and accounting services.
• In both systems, the transmitter and receivers must be operational for users to access the services. If either is down, the user is down.

Another similarity is that the impact of a service disruption varies depending on the importance of the service to the user. When television service is interrupted, the consequences are relatively minor in that the user may miss a few favorite shows. If however, Internet access or telephone service is down, the consequences are far more serious, especially if the user is a business user. In an IT infrastructure, a failure in an online order entry service is far more serious than a failure in an online employee benefits information service.

As a result, in either type of system, it is important for the service provider to manage the systems from a services perspective. Only in that way can the provider focus on those issues that are most important to users.

There are also fundamental differences between a cable television system and your IT infrastructure. One important difference is that in the cable system, the service provider maintains only the transmitter; users are responsible for their own receivers. In the case of IT, the service provider must maintain not only the transmitter, but also all of the clients. What’s more, unlike television receivers, client computers can expose the transmitter – that is, the data center – to both security and financial risk if they are not carefully managed. Finally, poorly managed clients are themselves vulnerable to risk of intrusion.

The consequences of failed or risk-exposed clients can be substantial, making effective client management just as critical to your business as effective data center management. Managing and maintaining clients presents a major challenge. There are often thousands in a large enterprise, and they may be scattered across wide geographical areas. There are many different types of clients – desktops, laptops, and handhelds – all configured differently, with disparate operating platforms and applications. Further, unlike television receivers, client computers are subject to a continuing torrent of patches and updates.

So how do you get your arms around client management? It’s enough of a challenge just figuring out what clients are out there, let alone ensuring that configurations are compliant, have the latest patches and updates, and are running only authorized software.

You can’t do it effectively with manual procedures. What’s more, regulatory requirements demand strict record keeping that manual procedures can’t ensure.

Service automation: the key

The only effective approach to client management is an automated one, an approach that:

• Automatically discovers clients and maintains an up-to-date description of every machine, including location; hardware and software configuration; and user(s)
• Automatically provisions authorized software to clients and keeps them current with the latest patches and update
• Automatically monitors for configuration drift and restores computers to standard configurations
• Automatically detects and repairs broken applications

It’s a tall order, but it’s an order that BMC Configuration Automation for Clients can fill.

BMC Configuration Automation for Clients is part of the larger BMC Service Automation offering that provides automated and service-aware configuration management for servers and network devices, as well as for clients. BMC Service Automation goes beyond automated configuration management to include such advanced capabilities as closed-loop change and configuration management and automated service request management.

The BMC Service Automation architecture is modular and highly scalable, so you can build a comprehensive service automation solution incrementally. BMC Service Automation solutions integrate out of the box. You are assured that each incremental implementation links seamlessly into a longer-term strategy of service automation.

The pain of ineffective client management

Inadequate client management exposes your organization to serious business risk, and malfunctioning clients leave people unable to perform their jobs. The impact can be substantial when you consider the number of clients in a typical medium or large enterprise. One large BMC customer has more than 150,000 endpoints and 4,000 custom applications under management.

There are a lot of gremlins out there to threaten your clients: improperly configured operating systems or applications; operating systems or applications that don’t have the latest patches; rogue systems; and user-installed unauthorized software. Any one of them can bring down a client and negatively affect other clients.

A down client is not the only barrier to accessing data center services. New and reassigned employees often experience delays in having their client computers provisioned, leaving them without access to the applications or databases they need to do their jobs.

Lack of coordination between the data center operations and desktop engineering teams can also cause downtime. Here’s an example. To meet the demands of its business users, the data center operations staff installs a new version of a mission-critical enterprise application. That version requires new client software, but that software has not been distributed. As a result, users can no longer access the application. Even worse, the configuration mismatch can damage other applications that have similar dependencies.

Inadequately controlled client software can also expose your organization to security risk. Client computers that lack the latest security or virus updates expose the data center to attacks and intrusion. In addition, poorly controlled software distribution may result in software license violations, thus exposing your organization to substantial financial risk.

If your clients have a large number of different software configurations, management difficulty is compounded. You would like to lock down your client computers to just a few standard configurations, yet users demand a certain level of flexibility. That means you have to strike the optimum balance between flexibility and control to meet user requirements, while at the same time, minimizing management complexity.

BMC provides a solution

BMC Configuration Automation for Clients meets the client management challenge head on. This policy-based solution integrates and automates provisioning and maintenance of end-user systems, applications, and operating systems according to user roles and corporate policies – with full verification. It permits your IT operations staff to cost-effectively and securely provision, update, patch, manage, and verify changes made to client systems, regardless of their location or network connection.

Automated discovery tells you what’s out there

Automated discovery finds all your client computers. It gathers extensive information that includes details on hardware, operating systems, applications, and networking, and maintains that information in a data repository for easy access. It can accommodate diverse environments, including discovery of clients that use Microsoft Windows/XP/Vista, UNIX®, and Linux®.

You can use a database system, such as Oracle® or Microsoft SQL Server, to store the data. To gain maximum benefit, however, BMC advises using the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which is included with the BMC Configuration Automation for Clients solution.

The BMC Atrium CMDB is an intelligent data repository that provides a working model of your enterprise IT infrastructure, maintaining IT resources as configuration items (CIs). It maintains details about the CIs, including their configurations and their interrelationships. The BMC Atrium CMDB presents a common view of users and clients – including desktops, laptops, and PDAs – which is shared by all the applications within the BMC Service Automation solution. By linking service definitions to a model of your infrastructure, the BMC Atrium CMDB permits IT processes to come together around a common view of how services are delivered to the business.

Definitive software library standardizes what’s out there

The BMC Definitive Software Library gives you control over what software gets distributed to your clients. It provides consistent, normalized software descriptions and links to your “golden master” software. It maintains consistency among your change, asset, and policy-based software configuration management tools to ensure that only the latest version of authorized, licensed software is deployed. The ability of the BMC Definitive Software Library to reconcile a single name for a software application and its versions provides the basis for true application deployment counting, a critical requirement for software license compliance.

Automated OS management speeds provisioning

BMC Configuration Automation for Clients enables you to quickly provision standards-compliant client machines in an efficient, accurate, and automated manner. As a result, your newly hired or reassigned employees will no longer have to sit on their hands waiting for their computers.

The solution automates best-practice steps for migrating and updating operating systems, including migration planning, approval, implementation, ongoing deployment status checks, and continued lifecycle maintenance – with verification. You can create tailored builds for different departmental needs, and store and maintain them in the BMC Definitive Software Library, ensuring compliance with corporate standards.

If Microsoft Vista is in your plans, you can migrate to it painlessly. BMC Configuration Automation for Clients supports Windows Vista disk-imaging tools and formats. It also provides a built-in integration of the Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) methodology to streamline your migration.

Automated application management keeps applications humming

BMC Configuration Automation for Clients automates the delivery, installation, updating, repair, removal, and management of shrink-wrapped and custom client applications on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. It performs automatic, policy-based, and role-based application provisioning, repair, and deprovisioning.

The solution can improve the reliability and availability of applications through automatic self-healing functionality. If an application becomes corrupted, or if a user inadvertently deletes files necessary to run the application, the solution automatically determines and downloads the files necessary to repair the application.

Automated patch management minimizes risk and cost

BMC Configuration Automation for Clients keeps your clients up to date with the latest patches. Automated patch update not only ensures that your clients and data center are protected, but also reduces cost by taking this time-consuming burden off the shoulders of your IT staff.

The solution automates critical patch management functions, such as patch collection, preparation, testing, staging, deployment, and auditing. It collects and stores patch information from multiple sources, including OS vendor sites and third-party repositories, reducing the costs associated with manual patch tracking, reporting, and analysis. The BMC Configuration Automation for Clients agent automatically identifies and pulls down relevant patches for their specific endpoints, optimizing their installation order based on dependencies and reboot requirements. This eliminates the need for your administrators to spend hours determining what patches should be installed on which machines and in what order.

BMC Patch Management

The solution also provides patch-testing capabilities that allow your administrators to group test patch installations within test environments, minimizing risk. In addition, administrators can use the application’s reporting capabilities to audit the state of patch and security compliance across the enterprise.

Keep licensing costs in check

With BMC Configuration Automation for Clients, you’ll know what licenses are out there and which are actually being used. Therefore, you’ll eliminate the expense of overbuying licenses and you’ll no longer have to worry about software license violations.

The solution tracks software usage, even when clients are temporarily disconnected from the network. It provides visibility into how often each client application has been accessed and for how long. Asset managers use this information to identify candidates for software license reclamation, permitting greater control over software license costs and compliance. The software usage component automatically removes applications that do not meet specified usage minimums or are unauthorized by corporate governance. Because you are better informed of software usage, you can better negotiate software licensing and maintenance contracts.

Closing the loop

BMC Configuration Automation for Clients is only part of BMC’s client management story. By combining BMC Configuration Automation for Clients with BMC Change Process Management, you can implement an end-to-end, closed-loop approach to managing clients.

BMC Change Process Management assesses risk, schedules change tasks, and collects necessary approvals. BMC Configuration Automation for Clients takes the action on client software and verifies completion of deployment tasks. Both work together in a “closed-loop” process that handles both the IT operations and IT service support elements of change strategy. The process is based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) best practices and includes a change tracking and reporting capability that facilitates regulatory compliance auditing.

Real world successes

BMC customers are reaping the benefits of client management solutions:

• A large engine manufacturer reduced software costs by more than 15 percent through better metrics on software usage levels.
• A major mortgage provider improved satisfaction of internal users by more than 20 percent.
• A large retailer reduced its annual expense budget by $1.8M, contributing nearly two cents to annual earnings per share
• A major European power company achieved a 15 percent increase in patch management process efficiency and improved first-time patch deployment success rates to more than 95 percent.
• A county government in the U.S. deployed Microsoft Office 2007 to 7,000 nodes at 34 different remote locations with a success rate of 97 percent.
• A major U.S. coffee retailer reduced application update costs by 23 percent.

You can realize similar benefits with BMC Configuration Automation for Clients. What’s more, you can build on your solution as you move up in service management maturity with BMC Service Automation. To find out how, visit www.bmc.com