In an effort to utilize and keep control of distributed systems, there is a demand to use what is categorised as system management software. Assuming a company is big enough and has operations spread out significantly enough to warrant a distributed system, the extensive benefits are quite self evident. For a growing enterprise, there happens to be cutoff point at which it becomes not viable to do individual installations on each station, and go through the paper and digital trail left by each user as a way to centralize the whole setup.

It therefore becomes necessary for managers to determine the information need of the organization and established goals for what is to be achieved with the proposed information system. It is imperative for the manager to ensure that his proposed information system has the full support of the management and adequate or required finances are appropriated for the project. If not the project might fail.

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.

The configuration manager also makes sure to uphold the four tasks used to define the sound implementation of the changes within the system. The first of which is configuration identification, which makes out all the traits that define each facet of a configuration point such as the hardware or software having an end-user intention.

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.

Then there is configuration control, which is the list of methods and approval stages that are needed to modify a configuration point's traits and reinitiate them. Configuration status accounting is the facility needed to document and deal with the configuration baselines correlated to each point at any time period. The last task is Configuration audits, which has two aspects: functional audits and physical audits. The former deals with the functional and performance attributes of the configuration point. On the other hand the latter makes certain that the configuration point is established according to what is required by the detailed design records.


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.