I am still waiting for that one company which is going to develop the univeral agent!
What am I talking about? Well, there is all this agent-based technology out there. You have to deploy some sort of code on all of your machines to monitor/enforce/… something. The problem is that nobody likes to run these pieces of code on their machines. There are complicated approval processes, risk analysis issues, security concerns, etc. which have to be overcome. Then there is the problem of incompatible code, various agents running on the same machine, performance problems, and so on.
Why does nobody build a well-desgined agent framework with all the bells and whistles of remotely managed software. Deployment, upgrades, monitoring, logging, etc. Then make it a plug-in architecture. You offer the most important functionality already in the agent and let other vendors build plug-ins which do some actual work. You would have to deploy and manage exactly one agent, instead of dozens of them.
Well, maybe this will remain wishful thinking.
Good idea, haven’t companies like CA or Symantec tried to do this yet? The major problem from my PoV is that there will be considerable opportunity for security problems in the code itself and given that it is networked by default. Also, solving the code verfication and code source validation (don’t want just any hacker hooking his code in there) is not easy.
Steve
Comment by Steve Lodin — February 2, 2007 @ 3:47 pm