Bit9

If you haven't seen it, there was a really well-written and in-depth article on Information Week last week about Who Really Owns the PC in a corporate setting - the user, or the company.

I loved reading this article because at Bit9 this is exactly the dilemma we are helping companies solve. A flexible solution that can give flexible control to IT so users have a lot of freedom, but IT still maintains the ability to keep the system's integrity maintained and security in line.

One of the most important points made in this article is the need for better communication between IT and the business units who run software. They need to discuss what applications are important, why, what risks are involved, and how IT can best support those applications the business needs.

Although it sounds very basic - it's very difficult to do with today's Windows operating system. There is so little visibility into what users are doing on their local PCs, and when using group policy or managing administrative privileges - all decisions are made locally to each PC, and therefore very difficult to roll up and spot trends and exceptions.

So what? Well - what that all means is - there are no tools that automate communciation. IT has no ability to monitor, dicsover, or be proactive (or reactive even) when it comes to what business users are doing. As important as regular face-to-face meetings are to discuss this - and we certainly believe that level of communication is critical to achieve a more controlled enviornment - it must be accompanied by the right information systems to make everything easy and build trust. Otherwise there is too much opportunity for misinformation, misunderstandings, and mistakes.

What do you think? Please comment on this post and let me know!