When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange...

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 established dozens of new policies designed to promote energy efficiency in the US. Little did legislators know that it would also produce a computer glitch reminiscent (albeit on a small scale) of the infamous Y2K bug.

It turns out that this legislation included a provision that altered the start and end date for Daylight Savings Time. Who cares? Your computer cares.

While the potential for disaster here does not rival the overblown Y2K phenomenon, there is potential for erroneous performance in the computing world. Computer operating systems and applications, of course, depend on clocks and time to coordinate everything from calendaring to messaging to file storage and more.  There’s actually a good, in-depth write-up on the implications for computer systems on the IEEE IT Professional Web Site.

So, once again, it’s recall time…and the race is on. Computer users and IT managers are on the hook to determine which machines are likely to suffer problems and apply the appropriate fixes before March 11, 2007. For organizations to be fully prepared, they’ll need an organized IT staff, reasonably powerful tools for identifying which computers need repair and automation capabilities for deploying patches and updates on computer platforms of all types.

Microsoft (MSFT: www.microsoft.com ) has made this relatively easy for customers deployed on Windows XP by providing discrete OS patches for this problem; however, things aren’t so easy for customers on older Windows 2000 platforms or mixed environments that could include Linux, Unix or Macintosh. And, even in the most straightforward case, customers still must verify that these patches have been uniformly applied to their computing infrastructure.  And, once they’ve patched the OS, they’ll need to verify that there are no application-level problems that they should expect.

All of this reinforces the recurring theme that it’s important for organizations of all sizes to have accurate data about what systems are in use and how they are configured. What’s more, they need tools that can easily and accurately apply configuration changes, repairs or new software to existing systems. Many Fortune 1000 companies have either developed or purchased systems with these capabilities. However, it’s the next 100,000 companies (the Fortune 100,000 as we like to call it) who have had limited access to solutions that provide continuous insight and instantaneous repair/remediation capabilities.

That’s why KACE (www.kace.com) developed the KBOX product line – an all-in-one, appliance-based offering that provides continuous lifecycle management. We’ve made a business of providing the Fortune 100,000 with the IT Automation tools that give them the visibility they need to identify which systems will be affected by problems (like the Daylight Savings Time change) and to repair those systems once identified.