US Patent 7996511 Enterprise-scalable scanning using grid-based architecture with remote agents

An enterprise coordinator coupled to one or more site coordinators provides configuration and scheduling of tasks across a plurality of sites, and accumulates results. Each of the site coordinators optionally manages one or more respective agents to perform agent-local ones of the tasks, and optionally manages one or more respective grid workers to perform, in a distributed fashion, site-local ones of the tasks. Each of the site coordinators optionally apportions a state file into respective work lists that are assigned to the respective grid workers, and concatenates at least some portions of received results to produce a new state file. Each of the grid workers performs operations in accordance with the assigned work list and returns results including an updated version of the work list. In some usage scenarios, a bootstrapping technique is used to install an agent program on unprovisioned ones of the agents and/or the grid workers.