With growing requirements of businesses, several configuration changes happen daily. Though a network admin could manually do the changes, errors could become likely, leading to faulty configurations. A bad configuration is susceptible to vulnerabilities that could result in a network failure. A network configuration manager would serve the purpose particularly well and help attain total NCCM (network change and configuration management).
NCCM – What Is It?
Network configuration and change management (NCCM) is IT management’s third leg that includes traditional fault and performance management. NCCM’s focus is to make sure there are procedures and policies to govern network systems as they move via their common lifecycle.
Therefore, NCCM focuses on and views the devices as an organizational asset and how the asset gets provisioned, configured, deployed, upgraded, changed, moved, and retired. Along the way, there must be controls as to who could access the device (which includes other devices), mode of access, and what they may do to those devices. All NCCM systems must incorporate auditing and logging also so that the managers could review what transpired if there crops up an issue later.
These controls are finding an important place for themselves in current modern network scenarios. Based on the research information you have on hand, anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of all unplanned downtime could be attributed to an error an engineer committed during device reconfiguration. Despite several firms having stringent written policies about device changes, the reality is several network engineers could and would use a production device and make changes on the go.
NCCM Vendor Offerings
Most NCCM vendors would offer you the following:
• Configuration change and control across different vendors, letting time-automated changes with unvarying centralized policies.
• Correlated inspections of when, how, by whom and where modifications were made – which could assist in troubleshooting issues, improving security, and conforming with HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
• Centralized and integrated access control supporting compliance and security.
• One-keystroke rollback for network components or individual devices, or the whole network – which includes disaster recovery support.
• Fault management integration with systems of different vendors. According to EMA, 60 percent or more of performance and availability problems are due to configuration errors.
Other benefits that are not as market-pervasive or obvious include service provisioning, business and operational workflow, infrastructure optimization, and design and staging.
Configuration Backups and Handling Network Outages
The first thing you can do to address a network outage problem is revert the network device’s configuration by uploading a configuration backup file. With this, you can decrease the network devices’ recovery period when an outage occurs. Also, a backup helps compare multiple devices’ network configurations.
