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Trends for Higher Education in 2009: Network Management

By: Dian Schaffhauser

2/17/2009

Likewise, some tools used purely for security monitoring may have side benefits for network management, he points out, "for tracking total traffic, for helping troubleshoot when there's a problem with performance or responsiveness of key applications, with tracking down the loss of accessibility for common resources."

Another major category that has gained importance in network management focuses on IP address management. The network access control sector has really advanced substantially in the last couple of years, Frey said, "driven a lot by higher education organizations because they have some of the greatest exposure. They have this mixed mission. They want to be open because information sharing and research access is a key element of learning. But they don't want to be so open that they're putting those shared resources at risk."

Network management-oriented deployments, predicted Frey, will weather the economic downturn with much greater ease than major capital upgrades in the IT organization. The reasons are twofold. First, regulations may require the school to implement certain types of tools, such as ones to monitor for P2P traffic, making them essential purchases. Second, their use can help the institution save in other ways, such as by pointing out underutilized resources that can be redeployed or by exposing flaws in the network setup.

As an example, Frey offered this: "The higher education organization often has satellite campuses, ordinarily with some sort of network link between them. Keeping an eye on and understanding what's driving volume of traffic across those is important. Maybe someone had misconfigured a data backup coming from the satellite campus so that it runs in the middle of the day, preventing that library in that branch campus from getting to the Internet portal, because its' clogging up the pipe. Your options when those links get clogged up are to buy a bigger, more expensive link or just deal with really bad service. For a relatively lower cost than buying a bigger link, you can deploy some sort of monitoring tool that can make those sorts of things obvious."


Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.