Business On The Wheels Of Network Lifecycle

Intelligent network services help a company better plan network
availability to realize the maximum value of technology innovations, now and in
the future. This is why 'Lifecycle Services' can be the framework that help
businesses proactively plan for future growth, as the network increasingly
becomes the platform for business

Information technology (IT) has become central to economic competition and is
increasingly viewed as being strategic to the business. Although, it was
invented over 60 years ago, its implications for strategy have just begun to
blossom. Peter Drucker, the late management guru had observed that it takes
roughly 50 years for the true implications of a technology to become apparent.
Subsequently, it takes many decades to fully play out.

Far from simply acting as pipelines for moving data, today's networks
integrate business strategies, processes, and goals with the information
required to run them.

For any strategy to be well executed, it must be well grounded in business
philo­sophy with a strong focus on how a business needs to keep pace with a
rapidly changing world.

Network-related business goals

Companies seek business value and return on investment (RoI) from their
networks in four primary areas:

• Lowering the total cost of ownership: Companies try to lower the TCO while
  they add new technologies to an existing network, procure equipment, train
  staff, manage network performance and maintain the network.
• Improving business agility: This can be described as an organization's
  ability to respond rapidly to changing business or market conditions, and
  adapt to the changing demands of its customers and business environment.
• Speeding access to applica­tions and services: The process helps enable
  business agility.
• Increasing availability: High availability depends on carefully planned
  redundancy, sound security and scalability.

Taking a lifecycle approach to operating and deploying the network helps
companies to accelerate their success with advanced technologies, to improve
their network's business value and RoI, and prepare for future growth.

By: GB Kumar

Accelerating success

The network lifecycle has six distinct phases: prepare, plan, design,
implement, operate, and optimize. A lifecycle approach orchestrates the
alignment of business and technical requirements at every phase.

Prepare phase: This calls for true alignment with the business, as it is
necessary in order for IT to provide companies with a competitive advantage. In
the prepare phase of the network lifecycle, a company establishes business
requirements and a correspon­ding technology vision. It develops a technology
strategy and identifies the technologies that can best support its growth plans.

After the financial and business value of migrating to a particular advanced
technology solution has been assessed, the company establishes a high-level,
conceptual architecture of the proposed system, and validates features and
func­tionality documented in the high-level design through proof-of-concept
testing.

Plan phase: A company assesses its network to determine if the existing
system infrastructure, sites and operational environ­ment are able to support
its proposed system. The organization tries to make sure that adequate resources
are available to manage the technology deploy­ment project from planning through
design and implementation.

Design phase: A company develops a detailed design that meets current
business and technical requirements, and incorporates specifications to support
availability, reliability, security, scalability and performance. In addition,
it develops a design specific to the technology system's operations and
network-management processes and tools.

Where applicable, custom applications are created for the technology to meet
the organization's requirements and to enable integration with the existing
network infrastructure.

Implement phase: Now a company works to integrate devices without disrupting
the existing network or creating points of vulnerability.

After identifying and resolving any system implemen­tation problems, the
company installs, configures, and integrates system components, while
commissioning the operations and network-management system. Once network
services have been migrated, the company validates that its operational network
is working as intended, validates system operations, and works to close gaps in
staff skills.

Operate phase: Network operations represent a large part of a company's IT
budget. An organization spends substantial time in this phase, living with the
technology in the company's environment. Throughout the operate phase, a company
maintains the ongoing health of its system, proactively monitoring and managing
it to maximize its performance, capacity, availability, reliability, and
security. The company manages and resolves problems or changes affecting its
system, replacing or repairing hardware as needed.

Optimize phase: The paramount goal of the optimize phase is achievement of
operational excellence through ongoing efforts. This improves the performance
and functionality of the system. A company tries to ensure that its operational
system is meeting the objectives and requirements established in its business
case and works to improve system performance and security.

Management practices are enhanced by improving network deployability and
operational efficiencies through a network-management system that automates,
integrates and simplifies management proce­sses and tools. The network must be
adaptable and prepared to cope with the network's technology strategy,
performance, and operations. or changing requirements. As it is changed to
support new business require­ments or to enhance performance, the network
re-enters the prepare phase of its lifecycle.

Conclusion

A lifecycle approach to deploying, operating and scaling a network aligns
technical and growth requirements of a business throughout the six phases of the
network lifecycle. Companies that protect, optimize and grow their network
platforms using a lifecycle approach will have the ability to create business
value and operational excellence, thereby providing the most value for IT
investments, now and in the future.

The author is Senior VP-Services Sales, Cisco India and SAARC