Intelligent Live Update Capability in SEP SBE 12.0
SEP Small Business Edition 12.0 has a number of optimizations to ensure it “simply” works in a Small Business environment. One of the those features is the Intelligent live Update capability which I will discuss in this blog.
One of the key things that administrators struggle with is ensuring that all the endpoints within their company have the latest virus definitions, IPS signatures, and other updates. This becomes more challenging with users that don’t connect to the corporate network often enough to download the latest updates from the management server.
Some solutions that we have seen small business customers implement is to install “Unmanaged clients” on computers that are always on the road. Unmanaged clients get their updates directly from Symantec servers but these systems don’t report back to the customer’s management server. The challenge with this approach is that the administrator does not get a status nor can he control the policy on these unmanaged clients.
Some other administrators punch holes on their corporate firewall just so all remote endpoints can connect to the management server to stay updated. Clearly this utilizes precious WAN bandwidth and no one prefers punching holes in their firewalls.
With SEP Small Business Edition 12.0, we have introduced an Intelligent Live Update capability to solve this problem so the administrator does not have to compromise with the above approaches. With Intelligent Live Update, computers can still stay updated even if they don’t have a connection to the management server. The client is intelligent to check its communication with the management server. If not connected and if the updates are out of date by a day, the client attempts to download the updates directly from Symantec.
This gives the small business administrator the ability to continue to manage the endpoint while ensuring that it is always up to date (without always having to be on the corporate network). The client is pre-configured out-of-box with this capability so no additional configuration required to enable this capability. One small tidbit that will make your life a little easier…
Nimesh.
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Comments 4 Comments • Jump to latest comment
This is obvious and ought to be the same way. Why this is not available in SEP 11.x at the first place? Is this a great tecnological advancement?
Hi Tejas - this is a minor capability which highlights the advantages of a product focused towards the small business. In future blogs we will discuss a lot of similar capabilities that work out-of-box that minimizes any work required from an administrator standpoint. When we start looking at a number of these minor capabilities that should be obvious, they add up to create a product that becomes Install and forget. A goal that we are trying to hit with SEP SBE 12.0. I think we have come pretty close to getting it to that point but feedback from contributors like you will keep us honest in the future. So why don't other products have it? Well simply because their focus is NOT just on Small business. If you look at enterprises for e.g. some larger businesses prefer to have a staging environment and not auto-update all their clients directly. BTW: you should try this product if you have cycles and send us your feedback.
It is available in SEP11. Just it's not that simple. What you have to do is create different Locations with different LU policies with SEPM and Symantec servers in there depending on location. But the location awareness is not present in SEP12SBE so there was a need to implement it in different way. That's the whole story behind Intelligent LU in my opinion. But I may be wrong.
The way to exclude files and folders was in SEP11 much more time consuming than in SAV CE.
Will be this improved in SEP12SB ?
TIA
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