End-point control helps regulate who changes what, when, and where for improved service availability. As applications become more complex, and the need to regulate change becomes more critical than ever before. Large integrated applications that combine many back-end systems ranging from databases, mainframes, information systems, or other applications across a myriad of platforms, operating systems, and hardware form a charlotte’s web of intricacy on which the foundation of the business is run. Add virtualization, grid computing, and Web 2.0 to that complexity soup and the new layer of abstraction further obscures the IT organizations ability to see what changes are happening and the impact those changes have on these critical business applications. The result is more downtime, slower performing applications, and longer time to resolution when problems occur because it takes more and more effort to determine “what happened”? How can businesses and application vendors solve or prevent these availability problems? One way to fill the gap is to protect specific files, configurations, and parameters at the end point. Most application vendor support organizations will tell you 80% of the application failures are the result of change associated with 20% of the parameters and configuration settings. If an application vendor had a tool that could lock down the 20% of the software that should remain “untouchable” once the application is set up and tuned, a significant decrease in application slowdowns and failure would likely result. For the application vendor this would mean higher availability applications for their customers, higher customer satisfaction, and far fewer hours spent providing unpaid support to repair applications that worked “yesterday”. by
Bill Lapcevic, Alliances
Bill@Solidcore.com | 
