Today, business priorities are driving the operational requirements for Network Operations teams. As business becomes more and more embodied in technology, IT has an ever increasing role in supporting the essential business requirements of managing liability and risk, maximizing revenue and minimizing expense. For network engineering and operations teams, translating those business requirements into operational requirements entails:
-Minimizing liability and risk associated with the network (e.g. network compliance and security),
-Maximizing network availability and performance (i.e., to ensure maximum availability of revenue generating applications), and
-Optimizing resource utilization for both IT staff and assets.
All of this places additional emphasis on the need for management systems that support managing the network at a business process level. As a result, the management marketplace is now at a tipping point, as IT organizations begin to adopt more progressive approaches to managing the delivery of IT services to their customers. Network management, rather than being an island peripheral to these changes, resides at the center of the storm, as it is in many respects the networked infrastructure where cross-domain insights and advanced automation come together.
This paper focuses on how network engineering and operations teams can achieve these operational objectives. It begins with a review of some of the challenges and hurdles blocking these objectives. Then it provides a discussion of best practice approaches aimed at achieving these objectives. And finally, it provides a review and analysis of HP’s Network Lifecycle Management (NLM) solution, which is specifically designed to enable network engineering and operations teams to achieve these objectives.
As businesses open up their networks to the outside world through eCommerce, web-enabled customer service, intranets with partners, etc., they also expose them to increased risk. With government regulations like SOX, HIPPA, PCI, GLBA, etc., IT must not only ensure that every device and interface is compliant and secure, but also provide documentation for periodic compliance audits.
This adds several orders of magnitude of complexity to network operation’s responsibilities for security and compliance. It’s no longer a question of if – the stakes of financial penalties and company reputation are too high – it’s really a question of how. With vast and complex networks, how can network operations teams ensure every device and interface is compliant and secure? How fast can network operations teams react to new security threats? Furthermore, it’s no longer sufficient to say that the business depends on the network – in reality, with the proliferation of web applications and IP based communications, it’s really that the business is embodied in the network. When the network isn’t working, company financials are impacted – either revenue generating activities are impacted and/or opportunity costs rise. Here the vastness and complexity of today’s networks makes it a challenge to ensure that every cable, interface, switch, router, VLAN, routing protocol, link speed, or configuration, is available and performing correctly. In addition, the network is affected by groups and services outside of the control of network operations. So when an application team moves an application to a new site or over an ocean, or when a service provider link speed is cut, or when someone changes a network device configuration over the weekend, network performance may unexpectedly degrade, impacting business performance.
Finally, companies have big investments in their networks, but few people to manage them. And those few people are responsible for both maximizing Return on IT Assets and providing a lowest cost operational service. This means they need to optimize network capacity and utilization while running a lean operation. But with the scale, complexity and pace of change of their networks, they can’t afford, or keep up with, manual processes at any level. For example, when operators are forced to scroll through thousands of events, or swivel between management tools that lack integrations, or manually conduct capacity planning, or focus their time on lower priority issues because they lack a business or service view of their network, costs are incurred and backlogs grow. Furthermore, when network management software doesn’t scale or cover multi-vendor networks, network operations teams must spend time and budget on extra management systems and vendors.
