There are “good” and “bad” pressures on IT. The green arrows represent the good pressure: pressure to add new business value by increasing productivity, driving customer connections, etc. The red arrows represent the “bad” pressures: the necessary, day-to-day pressures that require lots of time, resources, and effort to address but that don’t necessarily push the business ahead. It’s these pressures that consume 80 percent of most IT budgets today, according to analysts; that’s a lot of investment spent on “standing still” when you’d rather be spending resources that add new business value and take the business further.

As companies grow, their IT infrastructures grow along with them. But more often, the pace of that growth is uneven, driven as much by the conditions under which the infrastructures operate as by the models they aspire to. You add an application here. You add functionality there. You add people across the board. Yet the more variables you add to your infrastructure, the harder it can be to manage and, more importantly, to keep secure.

So even as the costs for hardware and software are going down, the costs of managing and supporting your infrastructure are increasing. In today’s competitive times, outsourcing non-core activities makes a lot of business and economic sense. Organizations are realizing that they can’t provide each and every service to their clients. As a result, they are focusing more on their core competencies and relying on service providers to manage critical but non-core processes for them. Offshore technical support can no longer be treated as a peripheral process. It requires a experienced and dedicated support team who will work around the clock to deliver higher value to customers.

In addition to this, there are many more reasons why a company should consider outsourcing. Some of the reasons are outlined below:

• Because you need to focus more on core business activities
• Because you don’t have the time to do it yourself
• Because you want to avoid the cost of new technology
• Because you want to reduce your present operating costs
• Because you want to reduce capital costs of infrastructure
• Because you want to make the best use of competitive resources available worldwide
• Because you don’t have the skills to do it yourself
• Because you want to maximize customer satisfaction
• Because you want to benefit from the provider’s expertise in solving problems for a number of clients with similar requirements

In today’s globalized and networked economy, outsourcing has never been so easy or made so much business sense. The question is not “Why outsource?” but rather, “Why not?”.

For instance, Intune highlights the ability to manage updates released by Microsoft, as well as block malware using Microsoft’s Malware Protection Engine. The buck does not stop there. It also enables technical support personnel in an organization to monitor PCs and provide remote desktop support for their users. Additionally, Intune also includes tools for tracking hardware and software inventory, including the ability to monitor assets, licenses, and compliance. It also has remote management tools like remote desktop initiated by the client through the Intune service could be very helpful for consultants and corporate IT when a remote user calls with an email problem.

From the first looks of it, the interface seems to be good which is built in Silverlight. Going to give this beta a try and see how it goes.

I was just waiting for something to happen from Microsoft end and after a long wait, yes it did happen. In a blog posting recently, Paul Cooke, Director of Windows Enterprise Client Security at Microsoft stated that the Sophos claim was deceptive and bogus. Further he adds that, “This test shows that most people don’t knowingly have and run known malware on their system. Malware typically makes it onto a system through other avenues like the browser or email program. So while I absolutely agree that anti-virus software is essential to protecting your PC, there are other defenses as well.” “I do agree that you still need to run anti-virus software on Windows 7,” Cooke noted, “but it is equally important to keep all of your software up-to-date through automatic updates, such as through Windows Update service.”

Now to the main point – I absolutely agree with what Paul Cooke has to say in terms of securing your PC. Being in the IT industry since 20 years now and moreover having given consultancy in Infrastructure Security to number of organizations, I’ve only seen that 40% to 50% of the problems faced by an organization are due to un-patched system, pirated software and out-of-date anti-virus signatures. In fact, when we install Windows Vista or Windows 7 on a PC, the operating system keeps on alerting via its Windows Security system if Automatic Updates are not configured or if the PC is missing an anti-virus solution. If that is the case, the question is – when and where did Microsoft claim that the new version of their Operating System Windows 7 does not require an anti-virus? If you know the answer to this, I would like to hear back from you.

So why do we need a centralized patch management policy? Well, the answer is simple – the systems are prone to risks and threats when exposed to the Internet or medias like USB pen drives, wireless networks and devices, etc. We all, at some point, might have experienced or read about the havoc caused by Blaster or the Sasser worms. Today software vendors have stepped up the releases of emergency and critical updates in a formalized manner to encounter these threats. Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday is a good example that highlights that. To learn more about this program, click here.

WSUS from Microsoft is a boon to Network and System Administrators in this scenario. WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) is basically designed to run on a company’s network and automate the process of patching. This free product from Microsoft does a fair job of streamlining the overall patch management process of an organization with centralized reporting. For a Network or System Administrator it is just a simple task of installing the WSUS server on a system and then configures all Desktops to use the WSUS server for software updates. This can be easily achieved by creating a group policy and linking the policy to the correct OU using Group Policy Editor. The Desktops would automatically announce their current status to the WSUS server with details like which patches are needed to be installed, which patches have failed to install, which patches have been successfully installed, etc.

In a nutshell, WSUS seems to be a good product especially when there is no price tag attached to it and starting with WSUS 3.0 the reports have also improved over its predecessor.