... real time and in context. Nicola Sanna dismisses much of the systems monitoring technology available today. "They monitor components and compare [current] conditions to historical data," says Sanna, CEO of Reston, Va.-based Netuitive Inc. But that won't give

you a true picture of the condition of your business systems, he says. "You also need the context in which the components operate," Sanna says, noting that data sources and the data streams among those sources "change constantly over time." That means your business services monitoring tools had better work in real time. Netuitive SI and Service Analyzer software does just that, Sanna claims. The two products learn and then define normal systems behavior based on time of day, day of the week and other factors. Sanna says that because the software runs in RAM, it can flag abnormal conditions based on events happening in the here and now -- not by looking back from the hereafter. The tools also predict how systems will function over the next two hours so IT can quickly redeploy resources to handle spikes and troughs in computing demands. By June, the company will upgrade Netuitive SI to include support for monitoring how seasonal events, such as the Christmas shopping rush, affect IT operations.

Lock down your network from ...

... the perimeter to the core. Automating network access control policies remains difficult, says Brett Helsel, CEO of Lockdown Networks Inc. in Seattle. Agent software is problematic because you can't install it on everything that attaches to your network, Helsel contends. And, he says, intrusion-prevention systems are potential bottlenecks and endemic sources of false positives. Helsel's alternative is the Lockdown Enforcer appliance. He claims that the Enforcer knows all the users on your network, their access rights, what devices they're using and where they're using them - meaning you can apply different access policies based on user location. The appliance's software is due to be upgraded on May 15 with support for Mac OS X. Pricing starts at US$24,995 for a model that can handle up to 2,000 users.

It's OK to outsource IT security, just ...