BEASTS: an enterprise management tool for providing information survivability in dynamic heterogeneous networked environments

The fundamental structure of enterprise networks has changed dramatically with mobility and mixed hardware/software platforms, thus making it necessary to rework basic system administration tasks, such as backup operations, host authentication, managing hardware/software configurations including patches, and provision of shared disk storage. NCSA has developed, and is currently testing, a software tool that can be used in a dynamic heterogeneous environment to manage these distributed network-based tasks better. The tool is called BEASTS (backup enterprise and security tracking system). The paper briefly presents the software architecture, GUI features, and preliminary results using this tool with plans for future deployment and distribution release.