IRS Blasts Worm With Autonomic Software
The Internal Revenue Service is as serious about auditing its computer systems as it is about tax returns. So when the W.32Blaster worm and subsequent attacks wreaked havoc on computer systems across the world, the federal agency was prepared: The IRS used autonomic computing software to distribute the appropriate Microsoft Corp. patch to more than 5,000 servers and 125,000 desktops and laptops across the nation.
The project, which took a week, saved the IRS more than $1.5 million in tech staff labor costs, according to Jim Kennedy, program manager of IRS Enterprise Systems Management, in Austin, Texas.
IT managers have long complained about the efforts necessary to stay on top of frequent security patching. Faced with tighter budgets and smaller staffs, organizations such as the IRS are turning to autonomic computing to automatically push software patches and software updates to end users.
"We had to accomplish in a few days what we normally would have taken a few weeks to do," Kennedy said. "There is no way we could have touched 5,000 systems in the first 9 hours if we had done this manually."
