 "'Know Thy Network': Golden Rule For CIOs")
Network infrastructure management is the heart of an organisation and every CIO knows this well, asserts Kalpana Maniar, who heads Business solutions and IT at Edelweiss Capital. She does not mince her words and spells it out quite candidly. Undoubtedly so, from enabling network access for day-to-day running of business functions to supporting the mission critical applications without any downtime, network infrastructure is also expected to support wireless and portable systems. It eats into a major chunk of the IT budget every year. And, experts suggest that it could become convoluted beyond repair if no definite strategies are designed to proactively tackle issues related to it.
Changing Business Dynamics Entangle Enterprise Networks
In the last few years the entire dynamics of the way business is conducted has undergone a sea change. Almost all major organisations are spread across a vast geographical area. Moreover, employees, who may or may not be mobile, stay connected to a centralised hub through different devices via numerous ports. All this needs to be managed, and system downtime is rarely forgiven. “All business applications and services run on network infrastructure. Managing it is key to performance of all IT-dependent services,” believes Jaydeep Nandi, Deputy GM (IT), Videocon Telecommunications.
But, just as too many cooks spoil the broth, the use of multiple devices and applications on different platforms, and products from different vendors ultimately culminates into a network chaos. Also, the number of devices per employee has been increasing, adding to the chaos further. S. R. Balasubramaniam, an independent consultant, who has worked in the IT management industry for nearly 35 years, including as the CIO of Hero Honda and Godfrey Philips, says, “It is true that network infrastructure management has become complex and is often a nightmare. We use a mix of technologies and many are of different vintage. And, though every vendor claims that he adopts industry standards, there are problems in integrating various solutions.”
And, while few like Kalpana Maniar are upbeat about having to choose from a wide array of vendor options available, not all share her enthusiasm with having a wide choice. Many feel that the deployment of multiple vendor products makes the network environment heterogeneous and complicated.
To add to the complexities arising from the availability of multiple products and appliances, there are newer technologies finding their way into the enterprises’ network environment to stay apace with the growing competition. The changes in the network management requirements and the costs of maintaining and upgrading equipments keep the CIOs on their toes. In fact, cost has emerged as a major spoke in the wheel of network infrastructure management, considering the constantly northward moving costs. According to analysts at Aberdeen Group, network costs have been increasing by over five percent in the past few years; physical expansion of networks is among the biggest contributors to this rise in costs.
All this puts a major onus on the management of this all-important network infrastructure to overcome the growing set of challenges.
Taming The Cost Monster
Difficult as it may seem, it is possible for the CIOs to keep the costs under control. “Mostly, CIOs encourage a mix module of outsourcing and insourcing. Some of the key applications used in an enterprise are managed in-house, whereas the other requirements are met through a third-party outsourcing,” says Maniar.
But, simple as it may sound, it is still a very crucial decision to differentiate between mission-critical applications that need to be kept in-house and those that can be outsourced away. Probably, the first step is proper planning so that the use of existent infrastructure can be optimised. In order to achieve this cost balance, a CIO must understand the business objective of optimising available infrastructure. For Balasubramanian, lack of competent network professionals that understand business, is a key factor for looking out. “One of the problems often faced is the lack of competent network professionals. CIOs often feel handicapped because his network manager would talk like a pure techie, and may not be able to grasp business needs involved. A CIO is, thus, largely dependent on vendors or outsourcers,” he explains.
With cost management taken care of its half the network infrastructure management battle won by the CIO. The other half still needs to be taken care of. And, different experts and CIOs suggest varied concepts and methodologies that cater to the various network infrastructure issues discussed.
Un-Complicating The Network
To begin with, experts suggest that before embarking on managing the network infrastructure it is imperative to first understand it. Consider bandwidth consumption in an organisation, for instance. It is senseless to spend money on bandwidth without understanding how it is used per application, or how it is utilised across different network locations.
Monitoring network infrastructure is widely considered to be beneficial, especially in the long run. “We have been using monitoring tools and have hence been able to identify applications with heavy traffic. We can now prioritise these applications over others to enhance application performance,” says Nandi. But this trend is yet to catch up among many of his peers. A majority of enterprises still resort to the ‘reactive’ rather than ‘proactive’ methods of dealing with network infrastructure issues. Experts believe that its time that the enterprises now move to a more proactive approach towards monitoring of their network infrastructure, to enable them to deal with the growing complexity.
On the challenge of disparate systems and vendors, Nandi suggests the ‘open’ approach that he himself abides. “We make sure to deploy products that are of open solutions so that devices talk to each other by a common network protocol,” says Nandi.
Network Management Concepts
Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director at Gartner, introduces a few concepts around ways of managing network infrastructure. “Concepts like Behavioural learning take network management to a whole new level where monitoring and raising of alarms does not depend on baseline setting, but more on patterns,” says Mahapatra. He explains that the system intelligently recognises and identifies a particular duration when the load increases on the network and demand increases beyond a set limit. Based on these patterns, support can be sought for limited durations only. Biswajeet further adds that once a system is devised to identify ‘patterns’ of how demand flows, it could begin ‘self learning’, a stage where the system starts initiating corrective measures.
Intelligent Metering is another concept wherein systems are not only monitored but are metered as well. These tools help improve network availability and performance, confirm network service quality and justify network investments.
Network infrastructure is, undoubtedly, an enterprise’s backbone that needs to run like a well-oiled machinery, albeit a rather complex machinery that needs much more than just oiling to run well. Despite the complexity, it is still not beyond the reach of CIOs, provided the golden rules are followed. And, leading this pack of golden rules and encompassing the rest of the rules for CIOs is - ‘Know Thy Network’, gaining a good insight into your networks. After all, how can you manage what you don’t know.