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5 Strategies to Manage the Distributed Enterprise


AND USHER IN THE NETWORK OF TOMORROW © CIFOTART - FOTOLIA.COM 28 BY JOSH STEPHENS I


F YOU spend time in the trade blogosphere, you’ve read a lot


about data center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing. That’s all important, but there’s something that’s just as crucial to us network engineers: the distribution of the enterprise network. The number of applications,


users, and devices is growing, and is increasingly dispersed across multiple locations and providers. Remote and home offices are commonplace. Then there’s the next generation of offices—shared space. Take, for example, San Francisco-based NextSpace, a company that provides “co-working space” where several different companies or individuals share offices and IT resources the way that different departments of the same company would. Networking teams are now responsible for delivering services in environments where we don’t even own the network connection at the other end. What’s more, we’ve got to add bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive applications for voice- and video-over-IP like Apple’s FaceTime or Cisco’s Telepresence. In order to accommodate the distributed enterprise, we must question how we monitor and manage application performance and availability of the network amidst all of this complexity. So, there are important strategies to consider.


Freedom Breeds


Productivity According to the iPass Mobile


Workforce Survey of employees at 3,500 companies, 93% of respondents


believed mobile technology made them more productive. With the right IT monitoring and management solutions in place to ensure network visibility, companies can support a distributed and highly connected workforce and gain productivity.


Learn About


Your Network Learn how your users want


to use the network. Know what devices are being used and from where. With devices such as the iPad and iPhone, the Android phone, and Cisco’s new Cius tablet, it’s not just Web applications affecting the network. Rich media, including voice and conferencing collaboration applications, must be taken into account. Network Admins must be able


to deliver secure and reliable application and data access to users of these devices from diverse and distributed locations. Technologies like NetFlow and IP SLA can provide critical network visibility of the network even as it connects all of these types of users and devices.


Out of Sight,


Out of Mind If you can’t see it, you can’t


manage it. When data centers are consolidated, availability and performance of the network is critical. No matter where the application is, it needs to be monitored. While monitoring the availability and performance of the application processes is necessary, it isn’t sufficient in today’s complex environments. You must also monitor the network, storage, server and virtualization


infrastructure that supports the application in order to resolve the most common user complaint, “the application is slow or isn’t working.”


Set Your


IT Staff Free IT staff can’t be effective if


they’re tethered to a desk all day. Just like mobile and distributed employees, IT staff will be more productive when they are equipped with mobile monitoring solutions that can be accessed from multiple locations and devices.


Your Eye


on the Future As the saying goes, “the only


constant is change.” Prepare for inevitable technological changes so that you can adapt in the most minimally intrusive way. Capacity planning and forecasting tools can be very helpful in this area. For example, with the availability of Windows 7, there’s renewed interest in retooling the desktop infrastructure. Desktop virtualization can create additional stress on the network. Network Admins should start thinking about it now and acquire the necessary tools to help with a rollout.


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