Network & Systems Management: Standards, Emerging Technologies and the Shift from Centralised to Distributed Paradigm

In recent years, the use of information resources has dramatically increased, with organisations becoming more and more dependent upon reliable access to this information in order to remain competitive. The explosion in the size and complexity of today’s local and wide area networks, combined with the increasing demands placed upon them for their resources resulted in establishing Network & Systems Management (NSM) as a factor of vital importance. To further complicate matters, the concept of single-vendor networks has vanished long time ago. Modern enterprise networks exhibit remarkable diversity of network and systems equipment necessitating the transition to integrated management. The primary objective of NSM is to maintain network and systems availability and health, aid in configuring the network and systems, guarantee Quality of Service (QoS), enhance performance, provide security, minimise operational overhead (execution of repetitive tasks) and decrease the cost of running the information technology infrastructure [HEG94].