Cost pressures, resource scarcity, and a lack of visibility into key business processes are driving customer demand for management solutions that do more than simply monitor network device performance statistics. IBM is responding to customer requests with its Autonomic Computing initiative. The IBM Intelligent Management solution is designed to maximize the ability of an infrastructure to perform and manage itself, while delivering comprehensive business insight to its users. As infrastructures are increasingly automated and expected to deliver greater business insight, ensuring their integrity becomes as critical as ensuring system availability. IBM and Tripwire are working together to deliver both.

The Intelligent Management solution is comprised of four key elements:

• Integration for efficiency - an open infrastructure enables organizations to combine heterogeneous platforms and devices into a single, end-to-end, organic entity. IT managers will be able to have common data reporting and identity management, enabling transparent access to systems and business information. Tripwire software fits perfectly with this goal as it monitors change across an enterprise infrastructure–regardless of device or platform–and reports to a centralized location for maximum efficiency.

• Optimization for operational and business value - Intelligent Management will facilitate rapid deployment and provisioning, and operate according to best practices. Best practices ensure maximum operational stability and security, allowing the business to deliver on its service level agreements to internal and external customers alike. With 70 to 80 percent of all changes resulting in downtime or reduced operational capabilities attributable to people within the organization (mostly accidentally or unintentionally), Tripwire software plays a key role in identifying changes, reporting the nature of changes, and securing a record of changes so that unnecessary downtime can be avoided.

• Automated for Productivity - IBM's "Autonomic Engine" is designed to deliver self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-protecting, and self-healing capabilities to the infrastructure. Centralized risk and change monitoring features enable autonomic functions. Tripwire solutions provide the visibility into all system changes so that IT managers always know when changes occur, what type of changes occur, and how they affect the infrastructure. A rollback capability also provides critical recovery capabilities that allow an infrastructure to heal itself while preserving system availability.

Tripwire software becomes an integral component of Intelligent Management initiatives, providing critical functionality to IT managers:

• Monitoring systems for health - Tripwire software centralizes change control, identifies environmental failures, and notifies of security attacks
• Providing decision support - detailed reporting capabilities provide important information, based on configurable policies to determine real security or downtime risks requiring actions
• Enabling remediation after unwanted change occurs - Tripwire software can provide the needed information or automatically roll systems back to a known baseline or "golden build" in keeping with best practices

Tripwire Professional Services can integrate authorized change information managed by IBM Tivoli with Tripwire's widely recognized change auditing capabilities. This powerful combination enables organizations to immediately know when the change management process has been circumvented. As a result, organizations increase accountability and control over unauthorized changes that are known to adversely affect regulatory compliance, service availability, and IT security.

Please contact Tripwire Sales to assess your needs.