The fundamental capability which configuration management provides is backup and archiving of critical configuration data from network and server equipment. This along with collecting detailed inventory data provide the basis for managing change and compliance.

The ability to detect, report and alert on change in near real time improves overall service availability and reduces the time required to identify the cause of incidents and outages.

This paper is to help Network Engineers, IT Managers and Executive Leadership understand the benefits of configuration management and how it contributes to change and compliance management at the business.

Opie has just arrived in the office and sat down to check his email. “Holy moly!” He yells out. He is looking at a massive influx of email messages in his Inbox from the Event Management tool, which was just configured to send out the alert notifications via email. “There’s no way the operations team will be able to respond to all those notifications in an efficient and timely manner. There has to be a better way to handle and address network events.”

The purpose of this article is to provide some practical guidance on securing Network Management systems and associated infrastructure. While it can’t make any guarantees of absolutely protecting from similar attacks in the future, implementing these approaches can make the job of an adversary significantly harder. It will also propose techniques for increasing the probability of detecting breaches, which should be a significant consideration within any security solution.

This article cannot provide exhaustive coverage. However, it will focus on delivering actionable guidance that will have a tangible impact in strengthening the Network Management’s security posture (and potentially other) Systems.

This guide is designed for IT Managers looking to implement Network Process Automation in their organisation. It discusses the best approach for change management and team buy-in, provides a methodology framework to use when considering the automation of a manual task in a network environment and the Tsteps to take in order to identify an effective test case for your organization.

In 2019, Nextlink implemented solutions from Opmantek for its monitoring, management, data collection and other operational tasks across its network. One of the products Nextlink uses, an event manager that automates event handling through extendable policies that enrich, correlate, organize and manage all the events in Nextlink’s environment.

With opEvents, Nextlink can automate event diagnostics and leverage intelligent automation to remediate network events which has helped to streamline its workflow. Using process automation, opEvents, modelled by Nextlink’s troubleshooting procedure, automates the troubleshooting and remediation of events, reducing the mean time to resolution (MTTR) when faults occur.