A tiered implementation consists of multiple levels of CA Threat Manager components strategically located throughout the organization on specific types of machines to provide the highest level of security to all machines on the corporate network. Advantages of a tiered implementation include:
Remote client machines receive policies and retrieve content updates from local servers instead of traversing the WAN to access the items from the main CA TM Server which is typically located at the data center at the corporate office.
Remote client machines have multiple locations they can access to retrieve content updates. If a computer that is normally contacted for updates is off the network, the client has additional locations available.
With advance planning and consideration of your company's physical layout, you can design a tiered implementation using as many or as few tiers as needed to provide full coverage for content updates and policy distribution.
Recommendation: For organizations consisting of 500 or more nodes that are located in multiple locations, we recommend that you deploy CA Threat Manager in a tiered implementation.