The future of network management is realtime, online and proactive.
So says Val Moodley, Business Development Manager, at OmniLink, SA`s largest Quality of Service (QoS) private VPN service provider.
"The reactive management modus operandi of network service providers (NSPs) in the past is no longer appropriate for businesses operating in the `New Age` economy where the network has to support mission-critical applications. In this world, under-performance or downtime of the network has an immediate, and negative, impact on the business," she adds.
According to Moodley, NSPs have invested in high-technology network management tools to handle bandwidth, SLA (service level agreement) and fault management of the customer network. This also enabled NSPs to make recommendations to their clients regarding steps to be taken to improve network performance.
"The majority of NSPs offer different levels of management to their clients as a bundled solution. The NSP should also utilise management tools to manage the operation of the entire network itself to ensure it meets clients` conditions regarding uptime and performance.
"For example, the NSP should also have the capacity to reroute traffic if any part of the network goes down. In addition to incident management, clients also expect the NSP to provide utilisation and capacity statistics on their lines and routers.
"This means the NSP must employ network management tools which allow it to meet its internal and external requirements," she explains.
Another network management strategy widely adopted by NSPs - particularly among those operating IP-based networks - is policy-based networking. In this way, NSPs can ensure that the client`s mission critical applications have first priority over the network.
By monitoring network traffic, NSPs can establish accurate usage patterns. This makes it possible to implement accurate priority standards for effective policy-based networking as the client seldom knows how much bandwidth is used for particular applications and how much should be reserved.
"However, because of the mission-critical nature of the network, few businesses can afford to wait weeks or months for an analysis of the network`s performance based on historical reports. Indeed, clients no longer want paper-based reports - they want to be able to log-on to a website, look at statistics pertaining to their network in realtime and choose the reports they want to see - not those the NSP choose to provide and interpret.
"This means NSPs have to invest in tools which enable them to give clients realtime information.
"Clients also want to be able to log faults and request changes in realtime. If they see a problem with bandwidth, they want to be able to send an online application for more immediately, not wait for a paper-based report to confirm their suspicions that the network is overloaded.
"We live in a realtime world. The challenge for NSPs is to utilise network management tools to ensure their clients can operate effectively in this new economic era," Moodley concludes.
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