CA IT Client Manager

(1)

CA IT CLIENT MANAGER PLAYS A CRITICAL ROLE IN HELPING YOU ENSURE SERVICE AVAILABILITY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY BY PROVIDING A UNIFORM WORKFLOW FOR THE PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT OF THE ENTIRE SOFTWARE PATCH LIFECYCLE.

Overview

Thousands of software patches are available every year and affect every area of the IT infrastructure. It requires significant effort for your organization to ensure that the right patches are accepted, tested and deployed. Typically handled in a reactive and manual way, patch administration can consume so much time from your IT resources that other higher value projects may be compromised.

Benefits

CA IT Client Manager provides patch research and management capabilities that provide a uniform process for managing the entire software patch lifecycle. This helps you to:

• Decrease time from patch availability to deployment

• Improve service levels

• Ensure desktop uniformity and business continuity

The CA Advantage

CA IT Client Manager addresses every step of the patch lifecycle and is backed by a Content Research Team that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This team gives you the support you need to help ensure that your enterprise systems are always up-to-date with the most current and effective patches.

CA IT Client Manager

Patch Research and Management

(2)

Research, Management and Administration of the Entire

Patch Lifecycle

Patch management is an ongoing and complicated process that can unduly burden your IT department. This is particularly true when your approach is based on reacting to every new patch distributed by software vendors.

With new patches released daily and your staff already stretched to the limit, a manual or improvised approach makes it very difficult to consistently respond in an efficient and effective manner.

Beyond the increasing volume of patches to be identified and evaluated, there is increasing complexity associated both with new patches and your ever-changing environment. Some patches may require domain expertise to ensure correct deployment. Each patch is a change and must be tested to understand its impact on other elements of a systems’ configuration. Delays in deployment, whether based on complexity or fundamental lack of resources, can also negatively impact the business. And even if you manage to get new patches up and running, there is the continual need to bring new desktops to the desired patch level.

CA IT Client Manager helps you meet these challenges with a uniform process framework that structures and streamlines patch management across the lifecycle of every patch — from patch monitoring and discovery through patch research, patch packaging, package testing and deployment.

CA IT Client Manager offers extensive patch research and management capabilities to help you provide consistency and reliability of software patch deployment and administration. It is designed to ensure that your enterprise systems are equipped with the most current software patches and that those patches stay in place and are effective.

Key capabilities

CA CONTENT RESEARCH TEAM AND ONLINE INFORMATION SERVICE CA dedicates resources 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to do the essential work to identify and make new patches automatically available for your enterprise, including:

• Constant monitoring for newly available patches and proactive communication with software vendors to receive advance notice of patch availability

• Validation of available patches to ensure they will install as described

• Research to determine patch applicability, patch signature, patch pre- and post-requisites and dependency metadata

(3)

CA CONTENT UPDATE SERVICE

ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT CA IT Client Manager employs a simple, task-oriented, user interface that combines with a web-based reporting portal to provide the controls and information you need to administer the patch management process. You can customize your personal dashboard and automatically receive scheduled reports per policy as well as alerts.

AUTOMATED DETERMINATION OF SYSTEMS REQUIRING PATCHES CA IT Client Manager provides the information you need to decide which patches will be deployed on which systems. This decision-making support is based on the system recognizing and presenting current IT assets and their ability to accept a newly available patch. Advanced logic and detection mechanisms can automatically determine which patches are applicable to which assets.

PATCH TESTING Facilitates and enforces a formal patch testing phase, assessing patch

packages (and patch metadata) against the required system configurations. This is designed to allow you to analyze potential impact before the package is approved for enterprise deployment.

PATCH LEVEL POLICY Determines the definition and maintenance of required patch levels for each class of asset based on:

• Patch Policy Templates that define the patch level requirements of each software component

• Patch Policy Grouping whereby defined patch policies are assigned and applied per dynamic or user-defined machine target groups

AUTOMATIC PACKAGE CREATION Uses the relevant patch metadata to automatically package the patch, and then automatically registers those packages for deployment.

PACKAGE DEPLOYMENT Automatically initiates package deployments per defined policies. You are able to control, direct and manage all patch distribution requirements from one central user interface. The system provides logic designed to ensure that pre- and post-requisites,

FIGURE A

(4)

FIGURE B

The console presents an overview of the patch management process and can be customized by the administrator.

ADMINISTRATOR CONTROL CA IT Client Manager lets you schedule a package deployment for a single system, a group of systems or the whole enterprise. You can view reports on installed patches to understand where and when each was installed and by whom. Also, you can get the current status updates on active or scheduled deployments.

Built-in workflows and error controls track what has been delivered and where. Automated retries and extensive error reporting are also available. A built-in calendar lets you schedule patches to prevent conflicts.

AUTOMATIC VERTIFICATION AND REDEPLOYMENT CA IT Client Manager continuously monitors to ensure that applied patches and packages remain valid and in effect. New or crashed systems are automatically restored to the required patch level policy.

PATCH MANAGEMENT CONSOLE

SINGLE POINT OF ADMINISTRATION With the introduction of a single point of administration, an administrator at the enterprise level can now manage the patch lifecycle from a single console across multiple domains.

ENTERPRISE-LEVEL TARGET GROUPS For multidomain installations, the administrator can perform targeting via enterprise-level target groups rather than just at the domain level.

DELTA ROLL-UPS Delta roll-ups are published on a monthly basis by the CA Content Research Team (see Figure A), and contain patches that are released that month, enabling the adminis -trator to deploy a single patch package each month. This process saves the patch adminis-trator time as the alternative is to manage the patch lifecycle for each of the individual patches within the Delta Roll-up.

(5)

RAPID PATCH DEPLOYMENT The administrator can choose to follow the defined patch management process or initiate an immediate enterprise-wide patch deployment of emergency patches.

DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS MANAGEMENT The patch administrator can specify granular pre- and post-patch deployment options. This reduces the impact of patch deployments by providing the user with the ability to specify the best time to deploy a patch to their end system.

STANDARD COMMUNICATION PORT All communications are now standardized upon TCP/IP ports 80 and 443.

EXPANDED PATCH CONTENT SUPPORT The extended patch content supports: Microsoft desktop applications Office XP, 2000, 2003, Adobe Acrobat, Quicktime, Macromedia Flash Player, Firefox, RealPlayer, Microsoft SQL Server (2000 and 2005), Microsoft Visual Studio (2003 and 2005), Microsoft .Net Framework. Microsoft Publisher, and IBM AIX 5.3 TL6.

SUPPORTED ENVIRONMENTS Windows 2003 Server

LOCALIZATION Local language patch content is available for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Traditional Chinese language patches. The user interface and patch information content is available in English only.

Reduce Cost and Complexity While Improving Efficiency and

Service Quality

CA IT Client Manager is designed to enable a uniform process framework that centralizes and automates workflow across platforms and applications to streamline management across the lifecycle of every patch. The solution strengthens your ability to make informed decisions within the patch management process. The right decisions at the right time reduce the risk of security breaches, nonfunctional applications and downtime.

Repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone tasks are automated to help you maintain the integrity and availability of enterprise systems. First, disparate functions are seamlessly executed so that you can be aware of newly available patches and their relevance to your enterprise. Second, patches are researched and validated to determine unique dependencies, pre- and post-requisites and relevancy. Ultimately, patches are tested, approved and scheduled for the systems that need them.

(6)

The CA Advantage

CA IT Client Manager supports your ability to properly and consistently manage the entire software patch management lifecycle. Despite your enterprise having multiple hardware platforms, operating systems with different versions, complex software licensing scenarios and remote users, the solution helps provide your systems with the most current software patches. Even further, it helps deployed patches stay in-place and remain effective.

CA Services

An important part of CA’s leadership in the IT client management marketplace is the team of dedicated professionals in CA Services. Whether your implementation is out-of-the-box or requires modification to meet your business needs, CA Services lowers your risk by utilizing the CA IT Client Manager Deployment Playbook for each engagement. The Deployment Playbook leverages years of customer delivery successes into a repeatable deployment methodology, workflow and best practice. By delivering these standardized implementations, you can achieve faster time-to-value with your CA solutions.

Next Steps

CA IT Client Manager supports your ability to provide a uniform desktop environment, increase efficiencies, reduce risk and improve service levels in support of business continuity. To learn more and see how CA IT Client Manager helps unify IT and simplify the management of complex computing environments across the enterprise for better business results, visit us at ca.com/solutions.