FLEET, UK - (HealthTech Wire / Opinion by Dirk Marichal) - Most people have little idea of the autonomic nervous system — the body’s miraculous automatic control mechanism — unless something goes wrong with it. That is how it should be: something that adapts to change automatically without conscious attention, and so makes it possible for most of us to go about our business undistracted and efficiently.
When an IT network is doing its job properly, the same applies — users just get the service they want without hassle or hold-ups. They may have little idea of the intensive work of the IT department behind the scenes, which manages the network to ensure good, reliable and consistent performance. Smooth IT delivery in the healthcare sector means less resources spent fire fighting changes in the systems and more focus on core services.
How much of the cost of IT is involved in such management? The analysts’ statistics are disturbing:
- up to 80% of all IT resources are consumed simply to maintain the status quo, according to IDC;
- over 70% of IT staff’s time is spent on unplanned work according to a study by Metzler & Associates;
- what’s more, every time a manual change is made to the network it increases the risk of error and network downtime;
- two thirds of all system performance issues are linked to network change, according to Gartner and IDC.
These are sobering statistics that must be a major concern for the medical establishment providing 24/7 high value care in face of rising costs, combined with pressure to reduce budgets. We will look into the reasons for this increase in management costs shortly, but first we should ask if there is any solution?
The human body already has the answer: management needs to be automated for greatest efficiency. The fact is that the routine and ever-growing burden of network administration and management can be dramatically reduced by adding the equivalent of an autonomic nervous system to the network.
As we shall see, this does not require a major rebuild of the network, but can be achieved by adding boxes that automate management functions and allow simple central control via an easy user interface.
Why network change has become such a headache
Network management is a discipline that emerged with the growth of the LAN — beginning in the days when the main task was to ensure that employees had a PC reliably connected into the network. Each PC needed a unique “IP address” and these were recorded initially on paper files and later with spreadsheets as the number of PCs increased. So management of the core network services was managed and recorded manually.
Meanwhile the network was growing steadily in complexity. As well as having a PC, employees had been issued with IP phones, laptops and now smartphones — each needing a separate IP address. Meanwhile, systems such as healthcare devices, fire alarms and entry control that used to be monitored independently were also being integrated onto admin IP networks. This amounted to a steady increase in complexity, rather than any sudden change, with the result that an astonishing number of organisations still rely on spreadsheets or, at best, simple tools like Active Directory to keep track of increasingly complex network structures.
These basic management tools are cheap and ubiquitous, but can usually only handle multiple domains and subnets by providing coordination outside of those systems – and such coordination is itself often based on manually maintained spreadsheets. Furthermore, in the many organizations that operate both Linux and Windows, some form of manual coordination between the two is also required.
Besides the labour cost and the opportunity for errors, such solutions pose problems for institutions subject to strict compliance or public scrutiny. Neither BIND nor AD nor manual spreadsheets have built-in history reporting and audit trails. For compliance reporting, these are needed on a regular basis, and involve even more tiresome manual labour.
Automating network changes is the cure
It is impossible to keep track of a dynamic system using manual procedures and out-dated management tools, so an increasing number of organisations are automating the management of core network services — such as DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management — to cut the risk of human error and to meet the reporting needs of government regulation.
The table below shows comparative times to make simple administrative changes manually and automatically, and the number of steps that could cause error. It adds up to an enormous potential saving in time and manpower, as well as a significant reduction in the risk from mistakes.
View Table 1. Comparative times to make network administrative changes
The saving is not just in day-to-day management of the network, but also when orchestrating major changes. Whether it is the integration of a number of separate departments, datacentre consolidation or simply a software upgrade, everyone fears that change will entail some sort of disruption, because there is endless scope for human error unless the change is itself automated. And an organization offering 24/7 high value care needs a reliable always on network that can cope with change without the risk of a network disruption.
Consolidation and virtualisation are increasingly serious issues as large organisations seek ways to reduce overheads and make better use of resources. In a virtual data centre, administrators must be able to re-provision processing power at a stroke. If this change is not highly automated, the many steps involved in re-provisioning the network infrastructure and its core services such as IP assignment (DHCP), DNS and IP address management (IPAM), will demand considerable time and manpower. Such necessary changes include: firewall settings, VLAN settings, QoS settings, policy settings, and other changes to both physical and virtual network elements.
While this rate of change and complexity is accelerating, few IT departments are expanding fast enough to keep pace. Nor is it only the problem of making the changes fast enough without error, one must also keep track of what has been changed. This is essential for purposes of audit and compliance, but also when connecting departmental networks or when providing a high-speed link to outsourced services. Unless both parties can provide accurate, up-to-date and mutually consistent data, consolidation becomes a nightmare.
Industry analyst Jim Frey makes the point: “There is little if any hope for manual processes to keep pace with the rate of change introduced by server virtualization and cloud services — the only reasonable answer is automation. In this case, network managers could benefit greatly from tighter automation and control around IP address management as an essential aspect of maintaining a highly functional, highly performing network.”
Automation in action
So what is needed to automate these changes to the network? It is not a question of a forklift network upgrade, but simply of adding devices at key points in the network.
The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust employs more than twelve thousand staff and serves a population of over two million. The Hospital was relying on Microsoft servers for DNS and DHCP, but the systems were difficult to administer and would not scale to meet the growing demands – notably of a new IP telephony system. David Rose, the Trust's Lead Technical Architect commented: “We cannot afford the situation where a paramedic picks up a phone in an A&E situation and there is no dial tone. That means that all aspects of the network infrastructure need to be designed to provide 99,999% availability. Therefore it has to include network automation technologies such as DNS and IP assignment (DHCP).”
The chosen solution was to install eight automation devices across the network but centrally managed as a unified system providing internal DNS, IP assignment (DHCP) and IP address management (IPAM) services throughout. The IT staff were very pleased with the result, citing dramatically reduced administrative cycles plus easy tracking of IP addresses and central management as key benefits.
In addition to DNS and IPAM, today’s sophisticated and yet simple to deploy solutions for network change and configuration management combine powerful automation together with clear visibility into the health, policy and compliance of the network. They can collect and analyse network infrastructure configurations, identify policy violations, show the impact of change on network health and remediate issues.
In short, they play a role analogous to the autonomic nervous system: enabling the automation of core network management and support highly dynamic networks, applications and initiatives in even the most complex and critical network environment.
Conclusion
Automating such core IP network services as IP address management, DNS and DHCP, and tying this in with automated change on network devices (switches, routers, firewalls, etc.), is the key to bringing together the many parts of an organisation into one integrated and efficient whole that stays resilient during change and expansion.
The fact that we humans can adapt to change and perform complex tasks without constant attention to the workings of our own bodies, is a tribute to the superb way the body’s networks are managed by the autonomic nervous system. We need similar automation of our IT networks to allow staff to spend less time on routine maintenance and have more resources for optimal service delivery.
###
Source: Infoblox
Dirk Marichal is Vice President at Infoblox EMEA.
HealthTech Wire′s Opinion informs about and analyzes important events and industry developments. © so2say communications. All rights reserved.
