White Paper Summary

Ensuring Business Continuity Through Network Asset Management - PDF: 146KB

A Standards-based Approach Speeds Disaster Recovery

Summary:

In the years since the IT industry's last big business continuity push — Y2K preparedness — our world has become a much more complicated place. So have networks, which now carry blended voice and data traffic, and hundreds or thousands of applications in the typical enterprise. As a result, networks are being pushed to their limits by ever-increasing user demands. This scenario presents tremendous risk should disaster strike — or if a company merely wants to maximize the value of its IT investments by extracting the highest performance levels possible from the network.

In today's environment, traditional business continuity approaches and manual network asset management tools are woefully ineffective. Network redundancy is not feasible due to cost and complexity, and network outages cannot be remedied by simple solutions like backup generators or even backup data center sites. Increasingly, business continuity requires the physical movement of people from one location to another which, in the event of a major natural or man-made disaster, can be utterly impossible.

A well-documented network is everything
No matter which business continuity strategies are put into place, their efficacy depends on having a well-documented network as the source for all related decision-making. Management frameworks of best practices, such as ITIL and Visible Ops, combined with automated solutions such as Visionael Network Resource Manager (NRM), provide the pinpoint accuracy and up-to-the-minute detail on network resources that are necessary for making informed decisions in times of operational crisis. This combination of product and processes also enables ongoing operational efficiencies to be attained and sustained.

Automated network discovery, as part of a network life cycle methodology complemented by workflow, is also the foundation for building and managing a high-performance production network for "business as usual." By eliminating tedious manual processes, Visionael NRM allows complex, rapidly growing enterprise networks to be understood and tamed — the first step in achieving an IT environment that can stand the test of any disaster it may encounter.