When a company has to install and manage distributed systems, it needs system management software. For a company that's large and has many operations in diverse locations with a huge number of computers, the advantage of using system management cannot be overstated. Without it, the company will find it hellishly difficult and expensive to do manual deployment and follow up on collecting paperwork and data from each employee to maintain centralized records.
Bring in system management at this point, and the benefits are massive and will ripple across every part of the company's operations. It reduces staffing needs and IT costs, enhances security and information sharing, and makes it easy to centralize data, monitor employee actions and network usage.
Installation & Management: Fast and easy automation for new installations and upgrades is the core benefit. A company with a handful of computers all located in the same office can do individual installations. But it gets harder when a company has a large setup and a gazillion computers. Introduce system management, and the problems go away, the entire process is now streamlined and automated and needs a lot less effort and manpower.
Cost Reduction: The question isn't whether or not this software will reduce costs. It assuredly will. The only question is whether the cost of buying and implementing the software, and hiring or training a systems manager, is feasible for the company. On the other hand, it cuts down staffing and IT costs on an on-going basis.
But the possibilities are much bigger than this, since the system management infrastructure opens up pathways to install enterprise level systems such as ERP and enhance the client server IT architecture. This allows the company to expand its footprint, add new operations to the work flow and open branches which previously would either not have been required or would have been impossible to manage. Bottomline is that this is not just an IT help tool, but something which will ripple through the company's entire operation.
Security: System management software helps enhance security in a number of ways. For starters, the security settings on all the computers are the same and can be managed remotely by the admin. Users can be given access to the exact same settings on all computers, based on usernames and their duties. This means the computers are more immune to hacking and other external attempts to infiltrate the network.
Critical security updates and software patches can be administered quickly and simultaneously to all stations, thus reducing chances of the system going down or being attacked. Anti-virus software and malware protection can be installed on an enterprise network level, which provides more protection. Centralized data storage and backups on servers offer greater safety and reduce chances of data corruption or data loss due to hardware problems.
Monitoring: A huge improvement in monitoring capability is one of the biggest advantages here, other than cost effectiveness and automation. Since the data on the network can be monitored, it is possible to make adjustments to more effectively manage peak periods and down time. Employee monitoring helps management keep an eye on employees and detect work patterns.
To summarize, the immediate advantages of using system management are very much real and the possibilities even bigger. End of the day, each company has to make an informed decision about this based on its own size and growth curve. A cost benefit analysis to figure out the ROI of system management software would be a good place to begin.
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