Each day, more devices, applications, and services are added to enterprise and global IP networks. To manage through this unprecedented growth, organizations large and small are bulking up network switching and routing equipment, but ESG believes that they continue to ignore a critical part of the network infrastructure: namely, core network services like IP Address Management (IPAM), domain name resolution (DNS), IP address assignment (DHCP), and user name and password authentication (RADIUS). ESG believes this could be a significant problem in the future, dramatically affecting a company's bottom that line.
Massive network changes make core network services more complex. Provisioning new IP devices and changing existing ones has become a real-time, dynamic process. This change exacerbates problems associated with today's manual tasks an, rendering current solutions obsolete. Without a change, organizations will experience more network downtime and higher costs.
IPAM may be the weakest link. Just as the network is anchored by core network services, core network services are anchored by IPAM, which may be a root cause of lots of network problems. Many sophisticated organizations still depend upon spreadsheets to track their IP number plan or hold data about each IP device. This makes provisioning, changing, and logging IP addresses a series of manual error-prone tasks, which simply can't scale to meet today's business, compliance, or security needs.
Organizations need a Core Network Services solution anchored by automated IPAM. With so many manual processes and technology problems, many IT shops spend about 80% of their operating budget maintaining their current infrastructure a true waste of precious resources. To modernize the infrastructure while reducing costs, legacy point services must be replaced over time with resilient, integrated services anchored by automated IP address management tools and then centrally managed.
Integrated, automated IP can significantly reduce network expenses. The right solution can deliver real and immediate benefits, sometimes reducing network expenses (capital and operational) by up to 50%. For example, IPAM costs alone can be lowered by more than 80% by significantly reducing the manual labor and policy steps required to assign, monitor, and support IP addresses while improving network availability and making it more capable of alignment with new IT initiatives.
