Dave Bailey

At many firms the network is the backbone of the business and needs to be treated accordingly. An availability of 99.9 percent still means a third of a day’s downtime each year, and the cost of that unavailability may be anything up to a million pounds per minute for some companies in the financial services sectors.

So pity the poor network manager. If the network goes down for a day, and your firm relies on voice over IP (VoIP), it means the phones might be down for the same amount of time. The result could be lost business as requests for quotes go to rivals, repeat orders are lost, and word of mouth damages brands. And if your company also runs web services and on-demand computing, the requirement for network availability may be closer to 99.999 percent rather than just three nines.

The most common cause of network downtime is still human error, but the likelihood of such error varies, depending on whether the network is a homogeneous system or a multi-vendor one. But amid the flurry of mergers and acquisitions, few senior executives put network compatibility at the top of their list of must-haves when considering such deals. Again it’s the network manager who suffers, as they have to meld two systems to achieve some sort of operational effectiveness.

A focus on network configuration management can reduce problems. It can improve mean time to failure (MTTF) and mean time to repair (MTTR) the network when it fails, which determines uptime. A key element of such a strategy is the actual configuration files of devices, be it switch, firewall or security kit, and the documentation associated with changes to configuration. And the documentation has to be up to date, because what might be considered a minor change may have big implications further down the line.

Keeping documentation updated may be difficult given the pressures on IT staff, of course. Imagine you are at home and you alter the configuration of your wireless router – do you write down what you did? Do you resave the configuration file? The challenges for enterprise networks are greater, but even medium ones could benefit from a proper network configuration management system.

In my previous column, I espoused the benefits of network simulation and security simulation tools. I said that though such tools are expensive, the cost is often justified if they help to avoid just one major problem.

The cost of network configuration management systems can be justified in a similar way, and as an added benefit they make compliance reporting much easier. Perhaps you could sell these systems to a CEO on that benefit alone.

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