If you want to apply and control distributed systems, there is a demand to use what is generally known as system management software. Assuming an enterprise is big enough and has operations spread out significantly enough to guarantee a distributed system, the advantages are really self evident. For a growing company, there is a cutoff point at which it becomes impractical to do individual installations on each station, and sort through the paper and digital trail left by every single user in an attempt to centralize the entire setup.

Virtually all of the businesses spend never-ending hours and way too high amounts of money paying off individuals to maintain their infrastructure for them. The great thing about infrastructure management is that there are individuals there most of the time that are looking out for the network and always ensuring that it is operating at its very best.

This is done remotely so even when the office is closed things can be repaired, slow servers can be noticed and repaired, and when the office reopens in the morning everyone will find that their systems work exactly the way they should, and they are none the wiser of any problems that existed or were repaired the night before.

Remote management means that you are paying an individual or provider to monitor your networks at all times. This means trusting someone, but it also means that you don't have to wait for something to go wrong to call someone in order to help you. It also means that a problem can be fixed as soon as it pops up instead of waiting for it to grow and grow and possibly have a domino effect on the whole system, slowing or shutting everything down.

Security: System management has a huge impact on IT security. The same security settings are implemented on all stations, and any new policies are remotely implemented instantaneously on all the stations. Users can access any station and get the same settings and data, made possible by settings that apply to specific usernames and job or department levels. This makes the network more capable of withstanding external attacks. Security patches and critical updates can be done instantaneously on all stations without any extra effort or manpower, which reduces the window that attackers can use to take advantage of bugs. The network gets centralized enterprise anti virus and malware protection. Even the data is more secure as regards hardware failure or data corruption, since everything is stored on servers with a backup system.

Monitoring: A huge improvement in monitoring capability is one of the biggest advantages here, other than cost effectiveness and automation. Since the data on the network can be monitored, it is possible to make adjustments to more effectively manage peak periods and down time. Employee monitoring helps management keep an eye on employees and detect work patterns.


To summarize, the immediate advantages of using system management are very much real and the possibilities even bigger. End of the day, each company has to make an informed decision about this based on its own size and growth curve. A cost benefit analysis to figure out the ROI of system management software would be a good place to begin.