System Administration: Drowning in Management Complexity

Yearly increases in the variation, complexity, and volume of systems management tasks are outpacing our ability to hire qualified administrators to maintain our IT environments. This talk presents a new black-box approach for reducing the complexity of systems and security management faced by administrators. The goal is to show this as a scalable alternative compared with current signature and declarative management approaches.

Chad's research on network management led to a job offer from MFS Datanet. He eventually arrived at Microsoft where he worked on the headless support in Windows 2000, then ran the development team for the first release of Microsoft Operations Manager before finding his niche at Microsoft Research. At MSR Chad cofounded the Cybersecurity and Systems Management research group, where he focuses on his area of interest: reducing complexity in software.