Cisco Systems DOC-78-17916 manual Piloting the Product, Running a Pilot Program, Details

Chapter 2 Deployment Planning

Piloting the Product

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 always 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.

	Installing Management Center for Cisco Security Agents 5.2
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