Chapter 2 Deployment Planning
Piloting the Product
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Installing Management Center for Cisco Security Agents 5.2
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Piloting the Product
Before deploying Cisco Security Agents (CSA) on a large scale, it is critical that
you run a manageable and modest initial pilot of the product. Even in a CSA
upgrade situation, a pilot program is required. Due to the unique configuration of
every individual enterprise, the pre-configured policies that ship with CSA will
not fit every site perfectly. A certain amount of policy tuning is alwa ys necessary.
This tuning is best done on a small sample of systems that are representative of
the whole.
Once the pilot is operating satisfactorily, with CSA protecting systems using
properly tuned policies, you can turn your pilot into a larger deployment.
The following sections provide a guideline for conducting a pilot of CSA and
deploying the product on a large scale.

Running a Pilot Program

Your pilot program should proceed in the following manner:
• How large should a pilot program be? Select a logical, manageable, sample
of systems on which agents will be installed. A good rule of thumb is to make
your pilot approximately one /one-hundredth the size of what the entire
deployment will be.
Details:
–
If your entire deployment will be very small, be sure to pilot at least
15-20 systems.
–
If your entire deployment will be very large, roll out your pilot in steps.
For example, do not pilot 1,000 systems initially and all at once. Start
with a smaller sample and gradually expand the pilot.
The pilot should include machines that you can access readily (either yourself
or through a responsive end-user). If you will eventually be installing agents
on multiple, supported operating systems, your pilot should include machines
running those operating systems. Again, systems in your pilot should be
representative of the whole deployment to which you intend to scale.