Remote System Management

Systems Management is the process of enterprise-wide administration of distributed computer systems and is a very important task for IT management. With passage of time, modes of system management have changed. A few years back, system management used to be carried out on each individual server or desktop, but nowadays, administrators are able to perform it from a remote location.

It is very essential to perform systems management from both the user and the computer perspective. A policy based systems management approach can be used to solve system management problems. There are many important remote systems management operations. One such important operation is Remote restart / shutdown of machines. Remote start is also known as Wake on lan (WOL) or remote wake-up. WOL technology can be used to automatically turn on a remote standing machine located in another building or even another country. Advanced wake on lan (wol) tools can even be used to turn a number of PCs on and then turn the machines off again when maintenance is done.

Remote policy update is another important systems management task. After machines are powered on and connected to the LAN/WAN, the server or desktop is upgraded with the latest configuration settings. A Group Policy is most commonly used in a modern Windows environment to carry out these configuration settings. A group policy is implemented with the help of a Group Policy Software.

Another important aspect of systems management is Active directory maintenance. Regular maintenance of active directory is required for many reasons because each domain controller maintains the Active Directory database. In case there are many domain controllers, the information in the Active Directory database is replicated between the domain controllers on preset intervals. In order to perform Active Directory maintenance, an accurate overview over all the user and computer account in the Active Directory is required. The administrator also needs a good and trusted way of identifying and disabling/deleting accounts to cleanup active directory. Cleanup process involves deleting, moving and disabling of accounts and increases the active directory security and general network performance.

In systems management process, you need to work with Active Directory and Group Policy to reach an environment with increased windows security. Moreover, there are also some security compliance issues, for example Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) to consider when looking at current Password policy. For (SOX compliance), IT management needs to understand the security risks in their network, and the information and systems must be properly protected. Stronger password policy involving a Password filter can be used to achieve the network security. A well configured password filter leads to a better password security policy and makes the organization password policy compliant.