I recently had the chance to work with Promisec, a company offering agentless Windows endpoint management technology. Microsoft's Windows has been a hugely successful platform for both PCs (desktop and laptop) and servers. Part of its success has been the rich environment that could support many different workloads. That rich environment, however, creates issues for IT.
Issues for IT
This flexibility is based on a complex, very flexible, architecture that is built on a set of processes and system services and a database that is a central point of control for the operating system, known as the Windows Registry.
The challenge of this type of flexible architecture is that portions of it may be altered without any notice being given to either the person using the system or the IT administrators who are responsible for managing its day-to-day operations.
This means that applications may operate as expected one day, present surprising behavior another day, and later stop working altogether. The problem may lie hidden in a process that did or did not start, a system service that was turned off, or corruption in the Windows registry that prevented the application from working properly.
Management tools for Windows Endpoints abound
If we look around just a little bit, we find that just about every company that offers management software, offers software targeting the Windows user. Microsoft, IBM, BMC, CA and a whole host of others have stepped in to help. Usually, these tools require the installation of agent software on each and every client machine that can gather information about the state of the system, the version and patch levels of each software component, and report back to a central hub that gathers the data, analyzes it and offers the IT administrator tools to view and manage that information. Installing all of those agents can be a costly and time-consuming task.
Promisec developed technology allowing access to an amazing amount of information without installing additional software agents. It even can work with other management tools and their agents if they are installed.
I wrote a sponsored paper about this technology based upon what I learned from Promisec. If you are interested, it can be found here.