Compliance Issues Still Bedevil IT - Page 2

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Patch management is another problem -- although respondents used a total of 115 solutions among them for this, 40 percent said they were unsatisfied with their current solutions and many still used manual processes for patch management.

Using manual processes seems strange in this day and age -- after all, Shavlik, which began as a patch manager tool vendor, was doing this about 15 years ago. But enterprise IT departments were forced to resort to this because "the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and other Microsoft tools aren't good enough," claimed Melby.

Not only do these tools lack robust reporting capabilities, but WSUS "only covers a limited set of Microsoft tools" whereas enterprises also run tools from other vendors on their desktops or servers, Melby said.

And systems integrators may be able to use solutions like SMS to automate assessments and deployments, but "the scripting you have to do to get the reports you need is almost a full-time job," according to Melby.

Top priorities for respondents were data protection and leakage prevention (53.2 percent); internal network security (51.8 percent); policy and regulatory concerns (43.8 percent); patch management (38.6 percent); and the security of virtual machines (32.6 percent).