NETWORK MANAGEMENT : To Outsource or Not to?

Growth of the network management space will be driven by what the enterprise
can provide, but also by what customers, communities, and employees want. The
key factor that will drive growth is change in enhanced user experience in terms
of mobility, points of access, universal identity, and availability.

The trend right now is a shift from box integration to process excellence,
management and convergence. Today, enterprises look at IT as a service and not
as an internal support function. Customers have reworked their IT strategy by
investigating changes in their business requirements, selecting the right
technology, and implementing changes in a planned/controlled manner.

This is a growing industry and India is certainly taking the lead.
Outsourcing network management to another company has its pros and cons. For
smaller companies lacking IT resources and expertise, it is certainly an
attractive offer. But for companies where network continuity is critical, there
may be a trade-off.

There are many different trends in the network management systems: simple
scalability, integration at various levels, supporting higher network
abstractions, supporting network in a box, multi-vendor devices, etc.

With heavy investments being put up in data centers, NOCs, and delivery
centers, managed service providers are gearing up to be able to proactively
manage large network systems.

Standardization results in economies of scale and better returns for every
dollar invested. There is a huge domestic demand to tie up all connectivity,
management and people processes to a single board with well laid out
correlations and controls.

SPs (service providers) will offer value-added services like network
management via dashboards. Through these portals, the enterprise IT staff will
have customized views of network status and device details.

A slew of new management products for enterprise networks have hit the market
in the recent months. It's usually good to have more choices, but with the
increasing choices, decision-making can become more complex.

One option, which few customers are showing interest in, is outsourcing
managed network services. Thought process is to hand off daily management of
network devices to network insight and utilize their IT staff for more strategic
initiatives. But Indian companies are slow to latch on to the concept of
outsourcing due to key concerns like giving up control, confidentiality,
reliability, technical expertise, etc.

The other option is consolidating their management software into one central
location, making it network operations center by which they would have complete
visibility in their network-from NOC activities like add moves and changes to
all the devices which are part of their corporate network.

Network management is no longer limited to just transport or maintenance, but
has graduated to network applications being managed for customer organizations.
Applications such as hosted mail, shared mail and other hosted and shared
applications are already becoming a part of network management. As this is
likely to increase the scope of work for the existing service providers, we
expect to see an overlap in services provided by different IT and telecom
vendors in the future.

Network management services have grown from their role of providing basic
uptime services to an integrated service with more focus on application response
management. It helps analyze information to optimize network performance, detect
problems in real time, diagnose problems and analyze the traffic in the network.
At times it also helps in identifying protocol- or application-specific traffic.

Its ability to discover complete networks automatically, capture and store
device-specific information and set thresholds to detect errors or abnormal
behaviors has made it a must-have for any organization targeting smooth IT
functioning.

There has been an increased intolerance among enterprises toward downtimes
and IT failures. Instead of reacting to a problem, their focus remains on
proactively addressing networking needs, leading to increased demand for NMS.
Thus, apart from base level uptime service for the network and bandwidth
management optimization, enterprises are now looking for integrated performance
management and application response time services so that the applications are
available at a predictable and consistent manner.

NMS is moving from pure play network uptime to integrated service delivery.
Organizations are looking toward correlating between different towers of the IT
setup and trying to actualize the application availability. Application response
time is driving the game. With infrastructure getting more robust, the trend has
shifted from network and linkup time to application response time. People are
also looking at services management rather than pure play network management.

A major wave of IT investments has begun across banks, financial services
institutions, telecom, manufacturing, government and education, IDC said in its
report on “India Domestic IT Market Top 10 Predictions for 2007”. This is,
probably, why India registered the fastest growth when it came to IT spending in
2006 with a 22.4% upswing and is forecasted to hold this position in 2007 with a
21.5% growth to reach Rs 75,891 crore.

Network management services will be driven by customers who wish to focus on
their core competence areas and let service providers manage the entire IT
infrastructure. It helps the organization to stay alert and respond promptly to
market opportunities.

The growing number of applications, users, locations, and different user
access technologies, etc has increased the complexities of enterprise networks
manifolds. Therefore, a solution is required which is able to cover all assets,
processes, and people under a single platform and manage them in a cohesive
manner from a dashboard.

New Technologies

Intelligent network fault analysis algorithms are aimed at getting to the
root cause of the problem rather than simple trap-based flagging systems. For
instance, if an aggregation router is faltering, it might raise millions of
alerts. Rectifying these alerts will result in large losses in terms of time and
money.

Technologies like MPLS over Ethernet have the potential to completely
redefine network flow and carriage patterns.

Solutions based on Netflow or IPFIX, IP SLAs and those based on
appliance-based instrumentation of the network will gain increasing acceptance,
so as to seek deeper insight into network performance and, thereby, management.

Network management is clearly heading toward highly integrated management
solution sets with an emphasis on proactive rather than reactive which would
enable customers to deploy and manage networks based on policies and also move
toward 'on-demand computing'. However, no vendor has a comprehensive solution to
manage large heterogeneous networks.

Network management is going to be an essential foundation on which
practically all the future business automation efforts are likely to rest. One
most important thing to note is that one cannot have one NMS to manage all
multi-vendor devices in the network. Hence, few venders are working on abstract
layer between network and the management platform, with this the NMS will
override or reside on the top of the abstract layer; this layer would have the
complete visibility of all the devices/servers in the network.

Budget Constraints

Budgetary constraints and competitive pressures have forced the industry to
drive down costs. Enterprises ask for lower management costs. The concept of
end-to-end solutions or one-stop solutions has gained momentum. Enterprises
don't have to spend money on different vendors. Also, bandwidth prices have come
down considerably, and device functionalities are increasing disproportionately
to price. However, the cost of resources and expertise is rapidly rising, as is
the trend in other related industries too.

Implementation of tools like NMS, help desk systems and other management
applications is still very complex and expensive. The market will be able to use
these complex infrastructures to serve their IT objectives. This converts the
entire engagement process into a lucid, opex model without having the risk of
failed installations, vendor lock-ins, obsolescence, etc.

Project implementation costs will be a challenge to manage, especially
keeping in mind the need for talented and trained manpower, both within
enterprises and system integrators.

Network management means different things to different people. In some cases,
it involves a solitary network consultant monitoring network activity with an
outdated protocol analyzer.

In other cases, network management involves a distributed database, auto
polling of network devices, and high-end workstations generating real-time
graphical views of network topology changes and traffic. In general, network
management is a service that employs a variety of tools, applications and
devices to assist human network managers in monitoring and maintaining networks.
So, the implementation cost depends on the complexity of the project.

Enterprises Want More

Today, enterprise networks are a mix of various service providers using
different communication media for data connectivity. Customers look out for a
single vendor contract that is able to liaison with numerous providers in a
single SLA framework.

Customers also expect service providers to provide consultancy on best
practices followed in change management, migration, system testing,
certifications, etc.

Hardware network components, nowadays, are considered more of a service
parameter, which needs to be proactively monitored and managed. Enterprises want
solutions that help address service degradation issues while delivering
enterprise applications over the IT infrastructure with root cause analysis.

Over the years, we have seen tremendous expansion in the area of network
deployment. As companies realized the cost benefits and productivity gains
created by network technology, they began to add networks and expand existing
networks almost as rapidly as new network technologies and products were
introduced. Certain companies were experiencing growing pains from deploying
many different (and sometimes incompatible) network technologies.

The problems associated with network expansion affect both day-to-day network
operation management and strategic network growth planning. Each new network
technology requires its own set of experts.

The staffing requirements for managing large, heterogeneous networks created
crisis for many organizations. An urgent need arose for automated network
management (including what is typically called network capacity planning)
integrated across diverse environments. Major concerns for most large companies
are how they can manage their heterogeneous network, which consists of various
products from multiple vendors.

Security and manageability have been major problem areas in network
management. Enterprises face numerous challenges, including managing and
controlling communication costs, building technical domain expertise along with
retaining them and managing technological changes while protecting investments
and providing continuum to the existing infrastructure.

As new technologies emerge and branches are added, the task of maintaining
the networks becomes challenging. Shortage of staff also becomes a concern. The
other big concern is how to keep pace with changing technology and going for the
right solution/architecture which allows organizations to seemingly accommodate
new technologies to meet future business requirements and also safeguard
investments already made.

Enterprises prefer solutions that are easy to deploy, manage and use. They
don't want solutions which become more of a problem to manage than the problem
itself. Security and data centers are still considered to be risky among
domestic customers. There are certain processes or information assets that
enterprises are not willing to move out of their buildings.

To Improve Cost Efficiency

Network management solutions should help to optimize the usage of resource
and help reduce response times of infrastructure, thus, lowering costs by
avoiding unnecessary upgrades.

In the global market for outsourcing, we quickly need to move up the value
chain and quality levels if we have to grow our market share at previous levels.
Other countries may soon begin to match our cost levels and, frankly, it may be
difficult to reduce costs beyond a certain limit. However, along with the first
mover advantage, we also have the benefit of a well-established clientele, hence
we believe it is the right moment to entrench ourselves as niche quality
players.

Indian companies should be looking forward to be known for their quality,
value addition and technical capabilities.

Effective knowledge management process, robust training framework,
automation, strong project management capabilities, low transition period, and
effective event management are some of the key points to improve quality and
achieve cost efficiency.

It is generally beneficial for enterprises to enter into a pure process deal
rather than a device or man-hour-based deal. If network management seemed like a
headache that never seemed to go away, outsourcing management services may be
just the right thing.

Hosting providers, systems integrators, network consultants, connectivity
service providers, facilities management companies, and even telecom specialists
are all getting into the act. They're investing heavily in infrastructure,
systems, and connectivity for the control centers they call network operations
centers (NOCs). Some players (like the ISP and data center businesses) are
modifying existing infrastructure for management services.

Broadly, outsourcing management services can take place in two ways-on-site
and remotely. For both these options, MSPs should comply with customer
requirements with a custom built solution addressing various pain points of
customers.

Networks that were set up 3-4 years ago were set up when options were
limited-bandwidth availability options were only 64K or 2Meg and nothing in
between. Now, with the advent of new technologies like MPLS and the influx of
multiple service providers, organizations are attempting to derive the best out
of these changes. Converged networks are also on the rise. Organizations are
looking to leverage their existing infrastructure and investment by
incorporating new technologies such as video and video transfers on existing
networks.

Secondly, uptimes have ceased to become a significant concern for customers.
With network infrastructure expected to support multiple applications, business
users demand consistent and predictable response times for critical
applications. Besides, organizations have started realizing that their bandwidth
requirement during the peak periods of the month or the year is significantly
different from the non-peak periods. The critical question for them is that can
they subscribe to differentiated levels of service aligned to their business
requirements.

Indian enterprises are increasingly realizing that managing networks is a
high-maintenance, capital/resource-intensive endeavor fraught with risk. At the
core of this challenge lies the fact that as applications get
centralized/consolidated, access to them via the network makes it the most
critical component of the IT Infrastructure piece. Thus, enterprise expectations
from networks has moved up from basic connectivity and monitoring to an
integrated and foolproof managed and secured setup.

Baburajan K

baburajank@cybermedia.co.in