Posted by In today’s IT environment, organizations are expanding geographically at a great paetwork reliability while empowering compliance, auditing and accountability. This has resulted in an exponential increase in the size as well as complexity of networks. As these enterprise networks have expanded, there followed a dramatic surge in new devices and new technologies in response to business demands. In this scenario, reducing network downtime and preventing performance degradation is a major concern for every IT manager.
A network administrator on a Reddit portal confessed that he erroneously cut a cable which led to over $3 billion in losses on a stock exchange. As one can see, most outages are caused by manual human intervention, opaque processes and often the big elephant in the room – faulty change management practices. With 80% of network downtime resulting from the aforementioned issues, the need of the hour is to reshape how network change is managed through the use of strong processes and automated tools.
Automate your Configuration and Change Management Process
Every organization dealing with multiple networks on their back-end needs an automated tool or numerous software products for efficient management of their network configuration. This is where Network Configuration and Change Management (NCCM) software plays an important role. An NCCM tool is the best option for organizations to tackle change while maintaining their networks and also updating the configuration of all the components in that particular network (both hardware and software). The latest NCCM products are helping to reshape network change management as a more process-aligned discipline with a widening range of values. These include supporting service integrity and service performance, minimizing downtime, optimizing security and compliance, managing network assets more holistically and accomplishing what in the past were unachievable new levels of operational efficiency.
Monitor and Manage Change in all Forms
If change is the only constant, then for a fact the network will ‘go down’, someday in the future for sure. When that happens the only thing that will get it up and running without business casualty is complete visibility and robust change management processes backed up by the right tools. Usually the configuration information of a network is collected and kept in a database so that changes can be easily tracked. This allows identification and traceability of device configurations. NCCM tools allow the changes made in the network, to be documented and to be easily rolled-back in times of crisis or network outage due to operational changes. When a fault has occurred, an audit trail is conducted, helping the IT managers to easily identify the source of the problem and take the necessary steps to solve it. Hence, NCCM can be defined as offering an assessment and remediation tool for automated network, security, compliance, auditing and configuration management.
- NCCM key benefits:
- Correlates audits of how, when, where and by whom changes were administered
- Drastically reduces fault analysis time as checks can be made instantaneously
- Accelerates compliance to critical security standards
- Empowers auditing to ensure that changes are implemented as described and mapped to an approval process
- Provides the ability to quickly rollback configuration revisions for individual devices or components of a network, or the entire network – including support for disaster recovery (DR).
- Coupled together with an alerting service it can also ensure centralized access control
Network Configuration and Change Management: Integrate now and reap the rewards in the long term
Organizations indicated a dramatic ROI with the deployment of an NCCM tool in their processes. They witnessed a remarkable improvement in network uptime resulting in better service to their organizations and customers. Also, more common outages due to performance and
security issues which results in misapplied configurations were reduced significantly. With strong adherence to change management processes and inclusion of automated tools, organizations can reduce change and configuration errors significantly. Similarly, time to assess the impact of change on the network can be reduced from hours to few minutes.
From a specific industry vertical perspective, NCCM helps banks adhere to norms set out in the RBI circular on guidelines addressing Cyber Security Framework in Banks. NCCM specifically fulfills points pertaining to Network Management and Security spanning inventory of authorized devices, appropriate configuration, and maintenance of network activity logs.
As we forge ahead in a world with exploding growth in devices, NCCM becomes crucial towards ensuring the uptime and integrity of networks. Decision making becomes easier, policy compliance becomes a continuous process and auditing gets empowered. Change no longer has to be a fearful and disaster prone exercise.
(Satish Kumar V, is Co-founder & CEO – EverstIMS Technologies. Views expressed in this article are of the author.)