Biggest Lie in Enterprises -"Network is Down"
By Amit Tripathi
Mumbai, Jul 31, 2007

CXOtoday.com's recent Power Breakfast event series in the country's major metros helped unveil the mystery of the common complaint in enterprises - "the network is down". The theme of the event was "IT Operations: Accelerate the Ecosystem"

Most CIOs were of the view that it's not the network, but what's being done in the network that makes it choke. Dispelling the myth that it's the network that's at the centre of all service delivery woes, many IT heads such as Krishnakumar of Bangalore-based ITES company - e4e - holds that it's not just the network bandwidth that decides accessibility. "How many of us prioritize user access to various applications considering their criticality for the business process?" asked Krishnakumar.

Research suggests that 80% of the e-mails that an enterprise handles are internal. Thus, experts believe that an innovative way to reduce the load is to segregate mail servers for internal and external usage. Dexter Wee, GM (iboss solutions) of Datacraft Asia, said, "Enterprises can approach the issue of network availability by dissecting the transaction quantity."

As part of this, he suggested that network traffic be categorized on broad aspects such as strategic and cultural. For instance, strategic importance can be opted for applications that users access more often. Cultural importance may involve aspects such as time-based prioritizing access to applications.

The CIO's dilemma is thus clear. On one hand, a CIO must deliver services as per the expectations of an organization's internal business users, and on the other, the IT infrastructure must deliver efficiency to the external users. Articulating the CIO challenges, M.S.Khannan, VP of Lason India, said, "The CIO's fate is mired by the challenges on last mile, lost mile, and his perpetual search for the lasting mile."

According to Khannan, the connectivity pangs bother a CIO in their effort to deliver services as and when required by users of all kinds. In the light of growing complexity and increased demand for better service delivery, experts believe that adopting the best practices laid down in Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 framework may address most of the worries and increase service delivery efficiency.

ITIL, released by OGC, presents a comprehensive set of management procedures with which an organization can manage its IT operations. This aptly takes care of the organizational structure and skill requirements of an IT department. A key change to ITIL v3 has been a focus on the alignment of IT and business, on the management of IT throughout the lifecycle, and on the importance of creating business value, rather than just the execution of processes.

Experts suggest that ITIL v3's stress on efficient monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with service providers goes a long way in bringing efficiency in the network. The framework may suggest organisations to drill down to specifics such as a vendor's response time to a certain situation.

Even while outsourcing IT management to a third party, ITIL v3 may suggest ways to greater efficiency. "It has to be a judicious mix of keeping the critical processes in house while retaining core processes in house," added Krishnakumar. Furthermore, experts like Wee suggest that outsourcing various segments in IT to providers based on their expertise ensures higher grade of service availability than outsourcing the entire IT setup to just one provider.

While most CIOs want to bring efficiency of their Local Area Network (LAN) to their Wide Area Network (WAN), experts believe that little -yet crucial - aspects, such as design of the databases, query optimization, etc. go a long way in enhancing the network availability.