> View this now

Published on: December 2007
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) (665 kb)
Length: 9 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
Today, business priorities are driving the operational requirements for Network Operations teams. As business becomes more and more embodied in technology, IT has an ever increasing role in supporting the essential business requirements of managing liability and risk, maximizing revenue and minimizing expense. For network engineering and operations teams, translating those business requirements into operational requirements entails:
- Minimizing liability and risk associated with the network (e.g. network compliance and security),
- Maximizing network availability and performance (i.e., to ensure maximum availability of revenue generating applications), and
- Optimizing resource utilization for both IT staff and assets.

All of this places additional emphasis on the need for management systems that support managing the network at a business process level. As a result, the management marketplace is now at a tipping point, as IT organizations begin to adopt more progressive approaches to managing the delivery of IT services to their customers. Network management, rather than being an island peripheral to these changes, resides at the center of the storm, as it is in many respects the networked infrastructure where cross-domain insights and advanced automation come together.

This paper focuses on how network engineering and operations teams can achieve these operational objectives. It begins with a review of some of the challenges and hurdles blocking these objectives. Then it provides a discussion of best practice approaches aimed at achieving these objectives. And finally, it provides a review and analysis of HP’s Network Lifecycle Management (NLM) solution, which is specifically designed to enable network engineering and operations teams to achieve these objectives.