“Tool by Tool” is No Way to Handle the Internet of Everything
- Collecting unrelated best-of-breed tools to detect, monitor, and control the entire IT network is an inherently faulty approach.
- The weakness of a set of [good, or even very good] point tools becomes even more apparent as enterprise networks extend in new ways.
- Point solutions fragment the discovery, visibility and mastery of your infrastructure.
- An infrastructure control platform with 100% visibility can improve the largest networks through the next 10 years.
Just when IT thinks it may have mastered the network, the network becomes something else. From desktops, laptops, and BlackBerries, it morphed rather suddenly into virtualized infrastructure that employees, guests, and customers access via tablets and a wide range of mobile devices.
Now, many companies are thinking, “Why can’t one platform help us manage both IT infrastructure and our industrial machinery? After all, real-time management of an enterprise should let us immediately model the financial impact of an assembly line outage, and respond directly.”
The network morphs just when you think you have it mastered
The network, having encompassed a mobile world, now becomes much more inclusive as enterprises mesh with the Internet of Everything (or “of Things” if you prefer that term). I will not repeat the usual list of new endpoints: sensors, ATMs, POS, HVAC, elevators, wearable health monitors, vehicle trackers – well, I won’t repeat the entire list.
Tools Do an Excellent Job, Just in a Very Limited Way
If your organization sells, or relies on, a tool that does a specific job with a particular class of endpoints on the Internet of Things, such as processing video from on-body police cameras, or an application that manages RFID tag readers on a supply chain, chances are very good that this tool does an excellent job at whatever it was designed for.
However, it does that job in a very limited, and limiting way. Let’s take a step back. NAC and ITOM tools and systems draw boundaries that doom them to inflexibility. Some network management systems don’t detect endpoints. Others “see” only certain brands or recent models.
Consider, for a moment, if each ITOM tool in your inventory had access to rich data–let’s say, device type, serial number, configuration, physical location, virtual location, status, and fault history–on every router, switch, port, and endpoint in your infrastructure. Take it a step further, and imagine all this data is fully up to date–never obsolete– and available at your fingertips, in real time.
Give Those Tools Superpowers, and You Won’t Need All Those Tools
Suddenly each of your tools has a much wider, and deeper, and current knowledge of the entire infrastructure. You may suddenly discover hundreds to thousands of “new” endpoints, since most organizations are unaware of 10% to 15% of their connected endpoints, and now you will see them all – 100% of them. Chances are you will no longer need all the separate tools you have relied on. With each one that goes away, you jettison a training burden, a software or app expense, an interfacing risk, and the risk of inconsistent data.
Next, let’s give each of your remaining tools control over the IT infrastructure it addresses. Systems that were in place solely for control purposes may become redundant. Sounds good thus far, but what does it require to become reality? At the heart of this scenario: a single consistent database, the CMDB, that must update dynamically as the infrastructure changes, and is the sole authoritative repository of all real-time data on all of your infrastructure, with no exceptions. 100% of your devices and endpoints are included.
Tools Leave Gaps. There’s a Way to Fix That.
As networks have evolved, and IT departments added one tool after another, they created gaps in the visibility and control of the network. NAC is a good example. Many security tools focus on endpoints, but fail to protect all network ports, leaving enticing entry points for hackers.
By contrast, an infrastructure-based approach, with a hardware-agnostic platform, overcomes these limitations. This platform, which will not come from a hardware maker, must detect not only routers, switches, and ports – but also the links between them, and all devices, wired or wireless, known brand or not, smartphone or on-body camera. No exceptions, no boundaries.
Use Auconet to Give Your Tools 100% Visibility and Control
Visibility / discovery is just half the job; control is its twin. With the Internet of Everything, the infrastructure platform needs to “read” and “talk to” many kinds of sensors and endpoints. It may surprise readers, but we know of just one such platform: Auconet BICS.
It’s tough letting go of familiar tools, despite their frustrating limitations. Keep those which excel, but consider using them with BICS as an integrating platform to boost their value and scope. Over time, we believe you will rely less and less on a basket of unrelated tools, and see the powerful advantages of a vendor-independent, 100%-visibility infrastructure approach, both for network access control and IT operations management.
