Continuing our discussion of support tools from Bomgar last week, let me report on the Altiris ManageFusion user conference in Las Vegas that happened in early April. Almost exactly a year after being acquired by Symantec, Altiris employees and users report mostly good things about the new products and integration with Symantec.

The theme of the conference was management and security must work together or networks will have neither. Supposedly Symantec bought Altiris to add network management to address weaknesses in its own product lines. Nobody from Symantec told me that directly, but it certainly makes sense for Symantec and customers of both companies.

Security is not a destination, it is a never-ending road filled with potholes surrounded by highwaymen ready to pillage the unprepared. Every desktop, laptop and server must be secured by patching the operating system and adding the latest third-party tools to ward off the hackers.

For large companies, the big push is to avoid ever having to physically go to a workstation or server and touch it for any management or security issue. Each physical visit, even if the technician is in the same building, costs a painful amount in time and money. Smaller companies may not measure productivity the same way, but they understand the cost of travel to support remote users and the loss of time when technicians are fixing individual workstations instead of attending to their other dozen or so jobs.

Microsoft's Auto Update function has improved, and will do a decent job keeping your Windows workstation up to spec, more or less. But how do you know? What if the user turned the computer off when they were told to leave it on? What if the user changed the Auto Update setting and didn't tell anyone?

If the device isn't managed, how do you know it's secure? To answer these questions you need either infinite time and great walking shoes, or management tools built for network security managers.

This sounds like a job for a tag team of Altiris Client Management Suite and Symantec's various security products, and that's what the product managers at Altiris/Symantec are putting together. Symantec Endpoint Protection, or Altiris Endpoint Security Solution? Do you want management agents in your security software, or security modules in your management software?