Theirs is an IT environment for which complexity may be too mild a word: 150,000 plus PCs, more than 7,000 servers, 72,000 mailboxes processing 4.5 million e-mail messages per day internally. And all this while keeping a workforce of nearly 50,000 employees, 6,000contractors, 17,000 vendors and 1,062 IT employees, among others, happily connected and talking to each other.

Besides availability, security is high on that agenda, including an objective which Microsoft has pushed for some years now, trustworthy computing, which aims to mitigate risk through the implementation of a number of strategies.

"On the network perimeter, we use a mix of technologies such as secure wireless connections and smart cards to ensure that only people who have been given access to the network get in."

Inside the network, Microsoft administrators are able to track how machines connect, by what corporate and group security policies they are enabled for, what anti-virus they use and how patches and security updates are managed. For instance, he says, "If the machines are not updated, then they go through automated shutdowns."

Automated patch management technology also ensure that corporate machines are up to date. A clear benefit is that users do not necessarily have to download security fixes and service patches themselves - if need be, and if policy dictates, machines are proactively kept up-to-date via the servers, through "force patching" if necessary. Devenuti feels that companies benefit tremendously from this, as users get the specific patches they need.