The deployment and management of Host Intrusion Prevention of agents is handled from ePolicy Orchestrator. In tis console tree you can group agents hierarchically by attributes. For example, you might group a first level by geographic location and a second level by operating system platform or IP address. We recommend grouping agents based on Host Intrusion Prevention configuration criteria, including system type (server or desktop), use of major applications (web, database, or mail server), and strategic locations (DMZ or intranet). You can place agents fitting a common usage profile into a common group on the console tree. In fact, you might name a group after its usage profile, for example, Web Servers.
With computer grouped in the console tree according to type, function, or geographic location, you can easily divide administrative functions along the same lines. With Host Intrusion Prevention you can also divide administrative duties based on product features, such as IPS or firewall.
With this release of Host Intrusion Prevention and ePolicy Orchestrator, policies are independent entities that are shareable across multiple nodes. You assign one policy for each category in a feature of Host Intrusion Prevention. Some categories, such as IPS rules, allow for several policies, with some either inherited from a parent node or applied at the node itself. In this instance, Host Intrusion Prevention handles conflicts by applying the stricter rule first. Through inheritance in ePolicy Orchestrator, when you assign a group node the appropriate policies, every system under that node automatically inherits its parent’s configuration.
Deploying Host Intrusion Prevention agents to thousands of systems is easily managed because most agents are likely to fit into a few distinct usage profiles. The management of a large deployment is thus reduced to managing a few policy rules. As a deployment grows, newly added systems should fit one or more existing profiles, and need only to be placed under the correct group node on the console tree.