Outsourcing is future of network management, say experts

"You cannot be serious! Why would any organization want to lose management control of its own resources?"

That was my network manager response several years ago to the idea of outsourcing. However, computer networking is a dynamic area, and some strategies that were unthinkable yesterday can become very attractive today. This is not an unusual phenomenon; change is only extraordinary when it happens to you!

So why has outsourcing of network and desktop management emerged as a reliable and cost-effective option for modern networks? Let's start with some figures first.

According to the Gartner Group the outsourcing market in general will grow from $18.2 billion in 1995 to $42.6 billion by the year 2000. And the fastest growing segment, within the outsourcing market, is outsourcing management for networks and desktops.

The Gartner Group predicts just the networking segment to increase from $2.73 billion in 1995 to $10.65 billion by the end of the century. The conclusion is clear - there's demand and service providers willing to fill the demand.

By 2010, 60% of organisations will outsource major parts of their network management because of the difficulties and risks involved with managing services internally....

There are many different trends in the network management systems

• simple scalabilit
• integration at various levels
• supporting higher network abstractions
• supporting network in a box
• multi-vendor devices, etc.

Enterprises Want More

Today, enterprise networks are a mix of various service providers using different communication media for data connectivity. Customers look out for a single vendor contract that is able to liaison with numerous providers in a single SLA framework.

Customers also expect service providers to provide consultancy on best practices followed in change management, migration, system testing, certifications, etc.

Hardware network components, nowadays, are considered more of a service parameter, which needs to be proactively monitored and managed. Enterprises want solutions that help address service degradation issues while delivering enterprise applications over the IT infrastructure with root cause analysis.

Over the years, we have seen tremendous expansion in the area of network deployment. As companies realized the cost benefits and productivity gains created by network technology, they began to add networks and expand existing networks almost as rapidly as new network technologies and products were introduced. Certain companies were experiencing growing pains from deploying many different (and sometimes incompatible) network technologies.

Indian enterprises are increasingly realizing that managing networks is a high-maintenance, capital/resource-intensive endeavor fraught with risk. At the core of this challenge lies the fact that as applications get centralized/consolidated, access to them via the network makes it the most critical component of the IT Infrastructure piece. Thus, enterprise expectations from networks has moved up from basic connectivity and monitoring to an integrated and foolproof managed and secured setup.