Archive for Virtualization Security and Management

Question: What Do NetChk Protect, Schlage Keypad Locks, and the BMW 328i have in common?

February 12, 2010 · Filed under Antivirus, Asset Management, Endpoint Security, Patch Management, Shavlik General, Virtualization Security and Management

Answer: All recently received a “Best Buy” rating.

NetChk Protect received 5 stars in all ratings categories and a “Best Buy” rating from SC Magazine. The magazine, geared to IT security professionals, was performing a rating of patch management solutions.

Shavlik came out on top of a group of 5 vendors who offer patch management. NetChk Protect received recognition as an “Excellent product with a fantastic feature set.” You can see the complete review here.

NetChk Protect was honored for its simplicity and intuitive user interface. The reviewers were especially impressed with how quickly they were able to start managing their physical, virtual, and software assets, patches, and AV.

Getting the honor is great. But I really hope IT administrators take the time to read the article that leads into the reviews. SC Magazine did a great job of identifying what may be the biggest IT nightmare for 2010: patching non-Microsoft software applications.

We all like to pile on Microsoft. It is an easy thing to do given their history of bugs and security flaws. But this isn’t 2004 and Microsoft no longer tops the list of most vulnerable software. No. That honor belongs to…drum roll please…Adobe. And Apple. And Mozilla Firefox. Hackers have turned their attention to client-side vulnerabilities and are exploiting them by turning trusted websites into malicious servers.

I give Microsoft credit. When it comes to patching, they have an established, mature process. They give users structured guidance, share research, offer tools to help with workarounds, have well-known avenues to access support, and are willing to go out-of-band to combat zero-day issues.

Contrast that with Adobe and Apple. They are 100% geared to the home user to the detriment of the business user. Their processes and their attitudes show it.

Business users need to demand more from their vendors. What happens to all those iPhone users if a business is forced to prohibit iTunes because Apple makes it impossible to patch in a corporate environment?

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Use Common Sense When Managing Virtual Machines

November 19, 2009 · Filed under Microsoft Security and Systems Management, Virtualization Security and Management

Our director of product marketing, Nancee Melby, has just launched a series of Common Sense videos focused on key areas of IT systems management. The first one focuses on controlling VM sprawl and getting a handle on your virtualization management issues.

You can find it on our virtualization management page or directly at this link

And in the very near future you will start to see some common sense systems management blog entries directly from Nancee on this blog site. So stay tuned,

Colleen Kulhanek
Director of Marketing
Shavlik Technologies

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IDC Presented Virtualization Trends This Week at vForum

November 13, 2009 · Filed under Industry Trends, Virtualization Security and Management

I traveled to VMware’s vForum event in Orange County, CA this week and was pleasantly surprised at how well attended this regional event was. Over 600 attendees were there to hear about the latest technologies available from VMware for virtualization management as well as to hear some new industry research results from IDC.

The use of virtualization has definitely been given a boost due to the waning economy this last year or so as IT departments have been forced to reduce hardware spending, as confirmed in this article by Jessica Davis.

I attended the keynote presentation which included a session by Michelle Bailey, the VP, Datacenter Trends and Enterprise Platforms for IDC. She revealed results from a recent IDC survey on virtualization use and concluded that server virtualization is now considered mainstream, sharing that 48.4% of the respondents indicated that the default build for new server hardware in their organization is “virtualization first, unless a business case can be made for standalone” and another 27.7% stated that their default build is “standalone, but we strongly recommend or incent virtualization”. Ms. Bailey went on to discuss the challenges that virtualization is intended to solve, namely, data center consolidation and efficiency gains. The operational costs of the data center continue to rise dramatically as Bailey indicated that worldwide spending on server hardware, power and cooling, and data center management are $180 billion annually.

As the use of virtualization continues to grow, the traditional costs of the data center will begin to be offset by costs of managing virtual machines and the need to track and control virtual machine sprawl and virtual machine movement. IDC continues to give guidance to their customers that without the proper policy and automation tools, spending on management and administration will sky rocket.

The focus then turned away from the data center and server management to desktop management as Patrick Harr, VP Product Marketing for Desktop at VMware gave a very engaging presentation on View4 just recently available from VMware. The new features in View4 will definitely give XenDesktop a run for its money and may help to accelerate the deployment of virtualized desktops at a faster pace than most in the industry predict.

IDC’s virtualization study also asked about plans for virtualized desktops and survey respondents stated that 9.1% of their desktop/client devices are virtualized today and plan that 15.7% of their desktop/client devices will be virtualized 12 months from now.

Hope this is useful for you,
Colleen Kulhanek
Director of Marketing
Shavlik Technologies

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58% of IT Pros Considering Cloud Computing

November 10, 2009 · Filed under Cloud Computing, Virtualization Security and Management

Shavlik Technologies recently conducted a survey of 290 participants at recent events and found that 58% are considering adoption of cloud computing. The top reason given for this was cost reduction. See our press release with further survey statistics.

We are getting ready to launch the beta of Shavlik’s solution hosted in the cloud, IT.Shavlik.com.  For registered participants, they will get free access during the beta period to many of the capabilities we offer today in our current solutions, but will be available from our IT.Shavlik.com web site. Hope you give it a try.

Regards,
Colleen Kulhanek
Director of Marketing
Shavlik Technologies

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Welcome to Shavlik Technologies’ Marketing Team Blog

August 5, 2009 · Filed under Asset Management, Shavlik General, Virtualization Security and Management

The purpose of this blog is to provide another vehicle for information exchange with our customers and partners. We want to use this blog to update you on both industry happenings and Shavlik happenings.  So visit here regularly for information on the latest product features and releases, case studies, product promotions, and upcoming events as well as new product beta opportunities or requests for product feedback.

To get the ball rolling, as many of you might know, we recently released new versions of  both our Shavlik NetChk Protect and Shavlik NetChk Configure products. We are very excited about the latest capabilities we’ve added around virtualization management and our newest addition to the suite – Asset Management.  In all honesty, we should have delivered this capability long ago.  Our unique agentless technology lends itself perfectly to the deep discovery that companies need to identify all of their IT assets. Our customers can now have a single view of all their hardware, software, and virtual machine asset information from the NetChk console.  Here is what one customer recently said: “I welcome the new asset management. It is very convenient to have this facility in the same program as is used for security patching.”

If you are a Shavlik customer that has tried our Asset Management functions, please let us hear about your experience.

Regards,

Colleen Kulhanek, Director of Marketing, Shavlik Technologies

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