Infrastructure Management Plays Critical Role in Network Operations

What is Infrastructure Management?

Infrastructure management (IM) is the management of essential operation components, such as policies, processes, equipment, data, human resources, and external contacts, for overall effectiveness. Infrastructure management is sometimes divided into categories of systems management, network management, and storage management.

Among other purposes, infrastructure management seeks to:

• Reduce duplication of effort
• Ensure adherence to standards
• Enhance the flow of information throughout an information system
• Promote adaptability necessary for a changeable environment
• Ensure interoperability among organizational and external entities

Importance of Infrastructure Management

Although all business activities depend upon the infrastructure, planning to ensure its effective management are typically undervalued to the harm of the organization. According to IDC, a prominent research firm (cited in an article in DM Review), investments in infrastructure management have the largest single impact on an organization's revenue.

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Perhaps one of the most important aspects to infrastructure management is to know that a problem exists before it impacts critical business service. The most effective and integrated infrastructure management solutions span distributed and mainframe environments to ensure quality service to users.

An effective infrastructure management system in place has numerous benefits:

• Improves productivity and availability of business processes, and people.
• Increases productivity by automating manual processes and by preventing problems before they occur.
• Ensures that vital IT assets are up and running when required to meet business service needs.
• Reduces complexity.
• Optimizes operating systems, networks, and middleware, ensuring maximum performance to enable business success.
• Leverages intelligent automation to free up key IT professionals to focus on high value projects.
• Quickly determines the root cause of problems.
• Reduces costs by right sizing and right timing your infrastructure resource deployments.
• Collects data more accurately and efficiently.
• Provides an enterprise-wide view of all components of your IT infrastructure.
• Aligns business and IT.
• Proactively notifies appropriate resources of potential threats to application availability.
• Sends alerts to central repository for correlation and prioritization.
• Correct problems and align them to business requirements rather than resolving them in the order they occur.

Role of Infrastructure Management in Remote site management

Remote site management can reduce time spent on traveling and troubleshooting while simultaneously increasing infrastructure availability and quality. It can also improve preventative maintenance, thereby gaining resource efficiency, and increase the time allocated to infrastructure improvement and expansion.

This is especially true as remote site technology is on a permanent growth path. The security and availability of these remote sites is vital to the performance of the entire critical infrastructure. Outage costs build up quickly from several potential sources, including lost revenues, regulatory fines, service level agreement penalties, and customer dissatisfaction.

It is also of critical importance to understand and appreciate the role of these remote sites within the entire organization. Remote site systems, such as cell towers, small central offices, oil platforms, are just as critical to optimal infrastructure operations. If ignored, failures within these systems can often be even more damaging than core infrastructure failures. Management of these disparate systems from multiple equipment suppliers is often very complex. Newer systems are likely SNMP-based, but older telemetry systems use simple contact closures as good/bad indicators to provide limited, yet critical, information. Such ambiguous information often requires further troubleshooting by regional field technicians.

Lack of strong Infrastructure Management has several downfalls

While maintaining critical infrastructure in such rural sites requires significant labor costs, this is only part of the problem. Limited connectivity options, mountainous terrain and inclement weather add to the challenge of effective infrastructure management.

For this reason, monitoring solutions are deployed at central network operations centers (NOCs) and master control stations. Because the personnel at these central locations maintain responsibility for the entire infrastructure, they generally monitor remote equipment only for critical failures. However, serious problems can happen at small sites just as easily as at large ones. Issues dealing with costly dispatches and low quality of service require flexible solutions.

Implementing solid infrastructure management is one solution to many site issues

The solution here lies in a more efficient approach to complete, intelligent remote site management. One that is designed specifically addressing the diagnostic, recovery and preventative maintenance activities of regional operations personnel and field technicians. This approach would improve operational efficiency and free up resources to support new capacity expansion and service roll-outs.

Flexible solutions for complex problems:

• Consolidate remote equipment and facility management as much as possible onto one powerful platform. Point solutions can clutter space-constrained infrastructure and leave technicians with information that is as incongruent as the systems themselves.
• Automate preventative maintenance checks and regulatory statistic reporting; store results for historical trend analysis.
• Provide correlation to help technicians recognize root causes to complex problems. Equipment failures caused by power outages, or low tank levels caused by pipeline leakage are more easily detected through analysis of information that is provided through a single system.
• Create a flexible architecture with diverse connectivity to meet the needs of any place on Earth.
• Ensure complete physical and logical security into and out of the facility.
• Maintain a consistent inventory record of disparate remote site equipment. This would result in shorter mean time to repair, better service, and lower costs through elimination of a significant number of site visits through remote management techniques.

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