Network Authority 6

Overview - Network Governance Defined

Managing next generation networks is becoming an increasingly difficult task. New sevices are added to the network every day, and we are not just talking about routers and switches; specialty devices for load balancing, traffic shaping, security and wireless dramatically increase the complexity and cost of managing corporate networks. But it is more than just the increase in device complexity and the sheer number of devices requiring management that are driving up the costs of running a corporate network. New applications that require specific service levels need constant attention. Audit and compliance regimens are dynamic and never ending. Security has become so complex in nature that a full time team is required to mitigate the risk. All of these things create a reactive, fire drill environment which is not focused on optimizing the investment in the network.

The network team is forced to handle all of the demands mentioned above while balancing the need for standardization to drive efficiency and specialization to support business demands. It’s a situation that most network teams can relate to because they live it every day of the year. This reactive approach is inefficient and risky; It has created the need for a new approach to network management. AlterPoint has helped 100’s of the largest companies break out of the reactive approach and adopt a Network Governance framework to become more proactive, safe and efficient.

In most enterprises, the network is an integral part of the business and is fundamental to support, sustain and grow the business. It is easy to identify the benefits that network technology can yield; however, most overlook identifying and managing the risks associated with implementing new technologies. The purpose of Network Governance is to ensure that the network team and the network itself meet the following objectives:

• Network decision making is aligned with business objectives
• Network decision making is analyzed from a cost perspective as well as a technical perspective
• Network related risks are managed appropriately
• Network resources are used efficiently
• Financial performance of the network is measured

AlterPoint enables companies to adopt a Network Governance Framework and meet the objectives listed above. Network Governance is based on two specific tenants. The first is an open, extensible, standards-based model that enables the discovery and normalization of thousands of attributes for every device on the network. Having a real-time view into all of the hardware, software, and configuration details for every device on the network is a crucial first step in governing the network to enable intelligent automation, advanced analysis and optimization of network spend.

The second is that it be “comprehensive,” meaning that it includes detailed representations for the entire network—all devices, vendors and services from core to edge, physical to logical—as well as aggregation of a wide range of network business data.

Network Governance goes beyond the simple, proprietary point tools for change automation common in the market today and provides enterprises with the right framework for effective network management.

Optimize the major drivers of network spend: hardware, labor, compliance and availability

NetworkAuthority enables you to govern your entire network so you can, align the network with the rest of IT and the business itself, be capable of assessing the network against any standard, any time and provide visibility, automation and control to 100% of the network.

There are some obvious factors that are forcing companies to overspend in the four areas identified above.

• Hardware spend is being driven mainly by over provisioning and unnecessary technology refresh. The convergence of wireless, voice and video combined with the demands from the business to roll out new services and applications put the network team in a position where the easy answer is always to throw more hardware at the problem. Hardware vendors love this solution and further exacerbate the problem by forcing unnecessary technology refresh cycles. It should come as no surprise that hardware spend is too high, given that most network teams consult the hardware companies first about anything related to the network.
• Labor spend is driven up by the lack of automation and the explosion of complexity. Special purpose devices make the task of managing the network very expensive since it forces companies to hire highly trained engineers who focus only on a certain device category, which keeps the engineer to device ratio much lower than is optimal. This problem grows exponentially because specialization does not allow for standardization and automation. The volume of configuration changes that need to occur is enormous, and today network teams have to rely on highly paid individuals to manually go make the changes.
• Compliance spend is driven by the reactive nature of audits. Network engineers spend up to 50% of their time focusing on preparing for and responding to compliance audits. In most companies the higher skilled workers end up running around gathering data and trying to prove compliance reactively instead of having a proactive ‘audit ready everyday’ approach.
• Availability spend is being driven by complexity as well. Results from a recent survey of more than 200 senior corporate executives and IT managers reveal that 97% of respondents who work at large companies expect downtime, and about half of those expect the outages to be significant enough to impact revenue. Network teams still have a break fix mentality and until that changes, downtime and fire fighting will continue to be the status quo.

NetworkAuthority helps optimize network investments by:

• Correcting labor inefficiency and specialization overkill
• Optimizing hardware acquisition, provisioning, maintenance and retirement
• Automating the process for adding new equipment and rolling out new services
• Lowering the cost and increasing the effectiveness of compliance
• Improving application availability
• Increasing reliability and speed of business and technology changes
• Reducing frequency and business impact of network failures
• Increasing control and security of the network environment

The network is not a cloud or a black box; it’s a business-critical ecosystem of hardware, software and logical services that is often in a state of chaos as a result of constant change, growth and convergence. Gaining control of the entire network—governing the ecosystem—is essential to succeeding in the key areas of network operations that optimize network spend.

AlterPoint is the Leader in Network Change and Configuration Management

In today’s business world, the traditional, element-oriented approach to network management is no longer viable. The network has risen to business-critical importance in many, if not most, industries, and any interruption to network services has a negative financial impact to the business. At the same time, the network has grown in complexity, and regulatory requirements now extend to networks. These factors generate the need for a new approach to network management, especially in network change and configuration management (NCCM).

AlterPoint meets the need with a solution that evolves the reactive break/fix approach to a proactive network governance approach to aligning network management with business objectives. In developing this solution, AlterPoint has leveraged the models that have been developed for IT service management. The institutionalization of best practice process frameworks — such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) — on which many of these models are based, has fostered profound advancements in the culture, training, and processes of IT teams.

To support the new approach, AlterPoint offers NetworkAuthority 6, a product suite with a foundation of industry leading network change and configuration management.

Rather than trying to be a datacenter ‘Jack of all Trades’ with shallow capabilities across servers, storage, application, and network devices, we are the masters of one—networks.

Through our network domain expertise, NetworkAuthority 6 is the only solution to offer network change and configuration capabilities that:

• Combines a comprehensive, open network CMDB with network analytics to achieve the network governance required to optimize the drivers of network spend
• Takes raw data from the network CMDB and runs it through an automated process to populate the datamart. This increases scalability significantly and allows sophisticated analytics to be performed against the datamart with minimal impact on the operation database
• Uses an open network model-based approach to normalize heterogeneous network equipment so that it can be centrally managed
• Collects more network configuration items than any other solution and offers the most comprehensive network CMDB
• Proactively identifies potential problems at the root cause so they can be remediated before they impact business service, unlike other offerings that only identify problems after they occur and keep the NOC in a constant state of break/fix firefighting

NetworkAuthority’s open approach that employs an extensible, standards-based and community-governed resource model for the creation of all configuration items (CIs) in a network CMDB. This allows for the capture, management and storage of thousands of attributes in a vendor-independent database, which in turn enables intelligent, policy-driven network automation, analysis and planning.