Introduction: When your business is just getting started, managing your desktop and server computers doesn’t seem like a big deal. Then one day you turn around and you’ve got 100 employees, each with at least one computer; a number of employees using Blackberries; a dozen or more different servers running business-critical applications; and a Web server accepting e-commerce orders.

Suddenly you have full-time employees doing nothing but managing all these technology systems, keeping them patched, updated, and secure.

What Is This Solution?

That’s where software that manages your technology systems comes into the picture. Systems management software products are designed to make it easy to manage all your desktops, servers, and other network devices from a single console. Standard features of SMS products typically include taking inventory of all your servers and desktop hardware and the software installed on each; automatically installing updates and patches to all relevant systems from a central location; monitoring systems to aid in diagnosing problems; and isolating devices from the network when they are under attack or infected by malicious software.