Knowledge is power
IIM provides immediate operational and business benefits that alone provide a compelling business case for its implementation. Most immediately, it enables faster problem resolution, which minimises business disruption – often cutting a downtime incident from hours to minutes. IIM also helps you make the most
effective use of your trained support staff by integrating with their current network management software to give them a comprehensive single picture of the whole IT infrastructure in one place and in real time, effectively extending their reach. Business directors, therefore, are going to see greater reliability, less downtime and lower support costs.
Sweating the assets
IIM also ensures that you get full utilisation from the IT assets you have. Most organisations of any size do not have an accurate picture of their IT estates and this frequently leads to unnecessary expenditure. With IIM, IT departments can ensure your systems are always right-sized. And there’s a real boost to your business agility when it comes to supporting activities such as a new office or department. Most networks have a significant
proportion - up to 40 percent according to Frost & Sullivan - of network equipment unused, but “unrecognised as unused” due to poor record-keeping. It’s called phantom utilisation and leads network managers to buy and deploy new equipment that the organisation doesn’t actually need and shouldn’t be spending CapEx on.
Auditable information
The level of detail that IIM provides, the accuracy of the information and the fact that it is automatically up to date and logged, also have significant implications for other areas of concern to business leaders today – good governance, security and regulatory compliance. Organisations spend huge
percentages of their budget on achieving regulatory compliance. Spending this budget successfully
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demands the level of detail that only IIM systems can provide. You have to be able to prove that your data is accurate. But you simply can’t do that unless you know who’s had access to it and can be sure there has been no malicious tampering. IIM gives you an audit trail of who has accessed your network, when they accessed it, and precisely where they were when they did it. IIM systems are also capable
of monitoring which files those users accessed and what they have downloaded. You can match this activity against your network and corporate policies and raise alerts if necessary. There are other products that can do some portions of this, but what they cannot do is track the physical connection and track actual connected devices that way.
Next generation
Next generation IIM solutions have solved the original problems detailed at the beginning of this article, by introducing compact, price competitive and user-friendly systems whose market acceptance is expected to be much wider. These new solutions require very limited additional rack space (e.g. 1U to fully monitor up to 2880 ports), while generating no heat, thanks to very low power consumption electronics. As a main differentiator, the day-
to-day information about network schemes and connections can be
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delivered directly through graphic displays integrated into intelligent patch panels and control units which allow field technicians to interact with the system quickly, easily and at the physical location of the connection. By integrating added value on-board
features such as circuit tracing, which can show every single element along a communication channel and work order management to provide guidance and feedbacks about correctness of field operations, these systems can greatly improve and optimise network management; collecting and delivering real-time information about moves, adds and changes, reducing downtime and troubleshooting time for a quick return on investment. The integration of the IIM software
platform with third party network management solutions can give a precious tool for all company managers, in order to get a complete overview of the status of all of their assets, with configurable reports about network usage levels and customisable interfaces for a full integration with corporate policies and procedures. These elements, combined with
the always increasing security and regulatory compliance requirements for both building and data centre networks, are now showing a growing number of projects and customer specifications for IIM in the entire EMEA market.
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