Virtual UC
Centralized Management
Managing servers, users, security policies, etc, is critical to the overall success of an organization.
Performing these tasks locally on each server, however, is inefficient and leads to higher operating
costs. In addition, inconsistent local management may introduce errors and lead to increased support
calls.
A centralized management infrastructure, which can be external, enables you to create and manage
information within your hosting environment far more efficiently than a local management
implementation.
A Web Service is a software system designed to
support interoperable machine-to-machine
interaction over a network. Software applications
written in various programming languages and running
on various platforms can use Web Services to
exchange data over computer networks like the
Internet in a manner similar to inter-process
communication on a single computer. This
interoperability (for example between Microsoft
Windows
™
and Linux
™
applications) is due to the use
Thanks to its Web Services, Alcatel-Lucent
offers customers the capability to integrate for
example user management within their own
business tool, like Microsoft Active Directory™,
IBM Tivoli™, HP OpenView™, etc.
These Web Services offer Move/Add/Change
capabilities, capabilities being able to be
extended to bulk provisioning.
Benefits
By centrally managing resources, your system administrators maintain information in a single central
location, applying policies to all the servers simultaneously rather than on each server. Utilizing the
centralized management as a part of your hosting solution helps to reduce operational and support
costs, and improves customer support response.
Centralized management of user accounts for example solves a major problem in distributed computing
environments: companies, as they grow, need to add people to manage all those users or they need to
look for an automated solution.
You should consider deploying the centralized management in the following situations:
Your hosting solution has many servers and your administrators manage these servers with local
user accounts and with no overall change and configuration control.
Your organization anticipates growth and needs to better manage the users to reduce cost, improve
consistency, and reduce the effort of maintaining the user accounts.
Your administrators use primarily manual processes to provision and configure the users.
Your organization is seeking a centralized approach to monitor, manage, and reduce cost and effort
of operations.
Edition 2, Ref. 8AL020043265ZZASA - © Alcatel-Lucent 2006-2007
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