As a midmarket business, you deal on a daily basis with the same IT challenges as your enterprise counterparts. Your users demand that you meet ever increasing availability, uptime, and performance standards, and your network obviously plays an important role in determining the level of IT services you can deliver.
The IT management task, including the effective management of your networks, poses unique challenges for midmarket businesses in great part because of the sizes of your organizations and IT budgets. The critical mass enjoyed by large corporations, which can translate into substantial headcounts and highly specialized personnel, is not a luxury midmarket companies often enjoy. All must "do more with less", but smaller firms feel the bite more.
Various Factors Accelerate Network Management Challenges in 2012 and Beyond
In many ways, traditional IT drivers - in great part related to user demands and rapidly changing requirements - are the bases for the management challenges facing midmarket network practitioners. However, a number of factors founded in the evolution of both technology and the economic environment in which business operate are creating new pressures on IT managers that have an even greater effect on midmarket businesses:
- Users Simply Expect More - At a high level, the extreme access capabilities available to your customers, employees and partners through Web-based mechanisms and devices drives these constituencies to demand more. You are called on to enhance performance, expand the portfolio of possible transactions, and ensure that access will always be there. The more you provide, the more they want. You'll need to be ready for this in 2012.
- Like It Or Not, You ARE the Business - As more business activity leverages technology, your management of network and other assets become more critical to organizational success. Your ability to maintain networks, servers, applications, and other assets, and the metrics and timetables that govern your work, are increasingly affected by business goals and priorities. A network failure or delay is no longer just about slowing down internal operations - network performance is now at the front lines of winning, keeping, and losing customers. There will also be a growing imperative to hold internal users to account in terms of their IT asset usage (and to have them pay for it). You'll see your "oneness" with business become more so this year - because revenue, cost, and profit are to a great extent within your control.
- IT Continues to Get More, Not Less, Complex - Technology has certainly served to automate for greater operational efficiency, but the cost has been increasing complexity of IT environments. Virtualization, for example, can lower the cost and increase the availability performance of networks and other assets, but the very nature of virtualization means that managing your assets is more complicated. Complexity may be less of an issue for midmarket firms that often have less platform, operating system, and application diversity than their larger counterparts, but complexity nonetheless is a growing issue for you. The growing focus on the convergence of VoIP and more traditional IP capabilities will make the complexity challenges for midmarket network administrators even more severe.
- The Cloud's Increasing Presence - As midmarket organizations grow, cloud-based implementations and " . . . as a service" models will become more attractive. In some cases, corporate management's perception of the cloud as "the way to go" may be all that's needed to compel IT to move in that direction. While IT must look carefully at all costs and benefits of the cloud for their businesses, going that route introduces challenges for all. Meeting compliance requirements, and maintaining adequate data and transaction security, are perhaps the two most important ones you will face in 2012 and for years to come.
There are other factors that will affect network management in 2012, but it is important to recognize that all elements of the network management task - as expressed in the "FCAPS" model (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, and security management) - will be affected by these trends in 2012, if they haven't already. Network managers in midmarket companies will need to address these despite limited (and less specialized ) resources.
The Midmarket Response: Focus on The Right Tools, Partners, and Approaches
Technological and market change is here in 2012, and midmarket network personnel will need to respond in kind. For many midmarket companies, an actionable plan for change will need to incorporate elements of both process and product.
To this end, we offer some specific suggestions that midmarket network administrators should consider in moving forward with their management initiatives and solution choices in 2012:
- Go From "Ad Hoc" to "Holistic" - In growing to midmarket size, you have had to adapt and enhance your approaches to network management along the way. Most likely you added products to your portfolio that addressed specific requirements as they arose, such as configuration management, SNMP support, triggers and alerts, and others.The factors affecting network management in 2012 and beyond will require you to step back and view your network more holistically, moving you toward solutions that support this approach.
- It's Time to Be Proactive - Responding to problems as they come up may have been the only practical way to deal with network issues in the past, but the new world mandates proactivity. For network managers, this means stepping back and considering solutions that continuously monitor all aspects of network activity and performance, automate the generation of alerts and actions (human or not) to correct problems. Solutions should also be able collect and analyze network data as input to the creation of both predictive models that can anticipate problems and remediate before they occur, and management policies based on real world experience that can over time increase network management efficiency and effectiveness.
- Embrace Process - In the past, midmarket network personnel may have spent more time applying intense human effort in order to "put out fires" than in creating a supporting a comprehensive network management process. Automated and analysis-based capabilities, such as trending, prediction, and the use of agents are important features that can support the process flows needed to keep networks running and at required performance levels.
- See Your Entire Network - As networks become a more critical element of how companies do business, and the number, variety, and complexity of the assets that use networks rise in 2012, you'll need to put greater emphasis on gaining visibility into when and how all of those assets are using the network. It's about "end-to-end visibility", and includes the ability to monitor and collect information from all server, storage, and other assets (virtualized or not), and that includes the cloud.
- Focus on Integration - Your holistic approach should be supported by an integrated solution that you can leverage to not only manage your entire network, but your IT management environment overall. This is, in fact, the only way to enable truly effective remediation of problems where the network may only be one issue. Regardless of the specific functionality needed - including traffic/flow monitoring, events, and others - the solution will need to present a comprehensive view of IT, with the network at the core, so that effective action can be taken.
- Don't Discount Configuration Management - Many midmarket businesses come from a place where both the number of asset configurations, and the number of configuration changes over time, were small. Recall your growing complexity challenge: Every asset - including virtual machines and desktops - require configuration. And the more assets you have to configure, the more your users will create new configurations (sometimes without your knowledge). Whatever solution you put in place, you will need to make sure it supports an integrated, auditable approach to configuration management that can scale with your organization's needs.
- Make Your Solutions Consistent With Your Resources - Just because management demands are growing doesn't mean your management resources are. Whatever solution you choose to implement, ease of installation, deployment, and maintenance will likely have to be at the top of your list of criteria if you are going to succeed with it. Solutions must also grow easily as your needs do. Your vendor must therefore not only provide you with the right solution, but must also be a good "partner" who can provide you both the technical expertise and the training/knowledge transfer to your personnel you need to leverage it effectively.
So Where Do You Turn?
A fully integrated, comprehensive network management solution that meets the above criteria would be a nice thing to have, but for many midmarket IT departments finding one may have been a challenge up to now. Solutions of this type and scale generally address the needs of larger organizations, and vendors who provide them charge based on their value. Both functionality and price generally don't translate well to what midmarket companies can afford, either in terms of purchase price or the resources required to support them.
The good news is that solutions that do are increasing in number. One type of vendors focuses on the network management market exclusively. Some of these have "grown up" from providing point products that address specific network management functional requirements. These could provide a good option if their current solutions are truly integrated (an important factor when the vendor's platform is in fact build on point products). Others have engineered integrated solutions from the ground up with small and medium sized businesses in mind. Both are likely to target midmarket companies, perhaps as their only target segment. While that may seem to indicate a stronger focus more on your needs, take care that they can provide you both the technical support and training you require.
Another option is to choose a vendor that offers network management solutions "as a service". There are well-known pros and cons to a SaaS-based solution, but it is possible that going this route can be more cost-effective overall for midmarket companies.
It is likely that your best choice is to go with a traditional enterprise provider that has historically furnished solutions to the midmarket and therefore has built product, support, and channels to support it. Vendors in this class bring a great deal of experience, although not necessarily with companies your size, so your consideration of a vendor in this group should include an evaluation of the degree to which they have worked with midmarket companies in this and other areas. Because they have served large enterprises, their solutions are likely to be well integrated and functionally comprehensive.
IBM is a good example of a traditional enterprise provider that has a long history with midmarket companies as a target market, and with system and network management as areas of domain expertise.
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.
