En Garde!

Survey Says… IT Managers Concerned About LAN Sprawl

By Rod Kay

Knowing what’s happening on the LAN, much less controlling it,  is becoming quite complex.  We hear concerns about managing access rights and other control issues all the time from our customers, across every industry, and the message is always the same. With the rapid increase in the number and types of users, applications and devices on LANs today, IT managers are losing visibility and control at an alarming rate.  To better understand this situation, and to get from anecdote to real data, we commissioned Loudhouse, an independent research consultancy, to interview IT decision makers in both the US and UK on these issues.

Loudhouse asked respondents to consider how their LAN had grown over the last two years and about anticipated growth over the next two years.  A key finding is that LANs have grown at fairly consistent rates across a wide range of axes and are expected to maintain this multi-dimensional growth over the next two years. Loudhouse calls this multi-dimensional growth “LAN Sprawl” – the combined effect of more and different types of users, applications, and devices and their inter-dependencies. Cross-functional users, third-parties, more diverse applications, and corporate, personal, and non-user IP devices are all in the mix, contributing to LAN Sprawl.

For IT organizations being asked to do more with less, this sprawl has become quite a problem. The video below provides survey results on the LAN Sprawl issue and some of the concerns IT has in dealing with this situation. If you’re having trouble viewing this video or text, click here for a larger slideshow with the full results.

We’d love to hear from you on this topic – are you feeling the effects of LAN sprawl? What steps are taking to regain control?

The survey, conducted in June 2009, is based on 200 interviews with IT decision makers from mid-size (250+ employees) to large enterprises (1000+ employees) across the US (100) and UK (100) regions.

Key Findings: LAN Sprawl Growth

1. 30% average growth in LAN size from 2007-2011 (average across all areas of growth)
2. The largest areas of growth in the network overall over the last two years are:
         *Number of applications (16.8%)
         *Smart/mobile devices (16.6%)
         *Remote working employees (16.6%)
3. The greatest area of risk for UK respondents: ability to control access in remote locations (50%)
4. The greatest risk for US respondents: inability to enforce appropriate usage policies (40%)

Key Findings: Resources and Growth

Key Findings: Resources and Growth
1. The greatest areas of growth are increases in:
         *Approved business applications
         *Number of applications supported by the network
         *Smart/mobile devices
         *Remote working employees
2. Over next two years, 55% of US companies expecting greater growth, and 44% of UK
         *The largest growers are also more likely to increase the pace of LAN growth
3. However only 42% of businesses have sufficient investment for IT to support their business goals 
         *37% say that staffing levels have increased to support LAN growth

 

The Rise of the Virtual Organization

By Michelle McLean

Yankee Group recently published a report entitled “The Era of the Virtualized Organization Demands Context-aware LANs.” ConSentry commissioned the report after extensive discussions with customers about how their businesses have been changing and the ways in which today’s static LANs have made it difficult for them to keep up with those changes.

What does Yankee mean by the virtualized organization? The term refers to the constant coming and going of different “workers” – including employees, guests, contractors, partners, even competitors – as well as those workers’ devices and applications. It also encompasses the idea of ad hoc groups, where people from different parts of the business, both inside and outside, come together to work on a given project (M&A activity, for example, or a CRM customization).

The Yankee report contends that given the rise of the virtualized organization, IT needs a more dynamic and knowledgeable infrastructure to accurately assign user access rights on the LAN. The report argues that to regain control, IT needs context in the LAN – deep knowledge of the user, role, device, application at Layer 7, destination, and environmental factors such as location and time of day. Based on this richer set of information, the LAN becomes an orchestrator – delivering the right services to the right people at the right time. And IT has the info needed to better manage the interactions amongst users, applications, and devices.

Essentially, with context-driven switching, policy becomes the new forwarding table.

You can read the full report on the ConSentry site, and hear Yankee Analyst Zeus Kerravala discuss what organizations require to solve this problem.

Clearly the LAN edge isn’t the only place to need context – the data center and the LAN/WAN boundary are two other places that would benefit greatly from a richer understanding of the users, applications, and devices traversing them.

Where else do you think context matters? And what other attributes will it encompass? I look forward to reading your comments.

Tales of Woe: IT Challenges on the LAN

By Joe Golden

While at the Interop show in Las Vegas last May, I was able to catch up with a number of IT managers walking the show floor in search of solutions for some of the issues they face on a daily basis. Although the faces were different, the stories were the same – tales of woe about remote users coming into the corporate network from unsecured home computers, new applications being introduced (often without IT’s knowledge), and the need to keep up with the constant influx of new devices on the network.

While these IT managers hail from organizations varying in scope and size, they share a common set of problems. Moreover, they share a common need for more visibility and control over the users, applications and devices on their LANs.  

To find out firsthand what IT managers are saying about challenges they face on the LAN, take a look at this video, “Growth Challenges on the LAN: Insights from IT Managers at Interop 2009.”

An Educated Guess

By Jeff Prince

Over the last decade, networking devices have been slowly moving up the protocol stack to deliver transformational business benefits.  For example, load balancers moved up the stack from L4 to L7 as they became application front ends that actually understood applications well enough to improve services for them.  As a result, companies were able to take advantage of distributed resources much more effectively. This is what happens when companies invest in sophisticated products - things work better – it’s not rocket science. 

More recently, WAN acceleration companies realized that load balancers were on to something, and they developed and deployed L7 knowledge to transform WAN application use and business practices. While the idea of adding L7 intelligence to your product is obviously one of the best ways to get ahead of the competition, developing the technology isn’t easy (in fact, that part might be considered rocket science).

Now L7 application understanding – tied to individual users – is offered in LAN switches. It’s not in every LAN switch, of course – the majority of switch vendors are still selling 15-year old technology based on L3/L4 information. These switches, based on the legacy architecture, are actually becoming business-limiting in their lack of support for today’s needs for visibility and application and access control.  If you ask IT managers, “Would you like to simplify the process of controlling network resources and have the ability to direct LAN policy to users according to their different roles in the organization?” my guess is they would probably say “yes.” It’s just an educated guess though.

What to Look for when Purchasing Network Equipment

By Rod Kay
In these tough economic times, justifying a new equipment purchase is harder than ever. One key element beyond needing the basic functionality of the device is investigating its impact on operational costs.

Data has consistently shown that opex constitutes 70% to 80% of IT’s overall costs, so buying equipment that can save IT time is critical. For example, being able to tie username to a traffic flow, with application information, can dramatically lower IT’s troubleshooting time. In addition, having this kind of user and application control built into the network infrastructure means IT can avoid the capex associated with buying overlay products and the opex needed to run all those disparate systems.

To get a feel for the value a given product can provide, IT buyers should explore the manufacturer’s vision for how business demands are changing and how the network must evolve to meet those changing requirements. Does the vendor’s vision for the business issues align with the challenges your organization is having? Does the current product meet your requirements today but also have a path for evolving with your business? Is there programmability and flexibility built into the system to enable the vendor to deliver on its vision over the long term?

In network switching, just getting a better switch will never be the right justification. Needing Power over Ethernet, for example, to drive a voice over IP or wireless LAN deployment is one common driver. But once you've decided you need a new switch, then you need to ensure you're getting the best value for dollar - today and in the future.

As IT Director John White of Technicolor explains, getting a programmable device that keeps up with business needs were top reasons he chose ConSentry to secure his network - you can hear his perspective in this two-minute Technicolor Case Study on YouTube.

The operational impact is key. Small and medium-size companies don’t have the luxury of extra staff, so they need devices that are simple to deploy and run and, more importantly, make key ongoing IT tasks easier.

Innovation is the Currency of a Down Economy

By Joe Golden

We’ve all heard the adage “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  Facing leaner IT budgets, many of our prospects and customers are being forced to consider closely what they need from their infrastructure to support the demands of their core businesses.  The savvier ones are using this opportunity to rethink the status quo and consider new approaches that might just simplify their lives as well as stretch their network investment dollar.

Networks tend to grow in incremental phases. As a company’s requirements and business drivers evolve, IT departments add on new appliances and applications to fill functionality gaps in their infrastructure.  Each individual phase of LAN growth must be separately provisioned, managed, and secured. They also need to interwork –contributing to IT pain.  Over time, networks that grow this way can remain cost effective only as long as the behavior of the users remains fairly static—that is, there are not too many moves, adds, and changes and no new surprises. 

But in most successful companies today, user behavior is more fluid—because that’s what is required for the core business to remain innovative.  Today’s IT departments need the ability to create ad hoc groups to work on projects as required.  Some of these groups will include third-party users for temporary amounts of time.  Increasingly IT also must support more users working remotely and needing access to corporate resources from home offices and mobile devices.  They need clear visibility into application use and audit trails of all different types of users—employees and third parties alike—to demonstrate “who” is doing “what” “when”.  The operational burden of provisioning, controlling, and managing access in this type of virtualized organization can threaten the ability of IT to keep up with business demands.

Business innovations are driving companies to extend their corporate networks, and technical innovations are now available to address the challenges this phenomenon creates for IT groups.  When IT decides to upgrade its LAN infrastructure, decision-makers are looking at context-driven LAN Switches to address these issues. By using high-powered L7 processing, organizations can gain visibility into traffic forwarding decisions and have the ability to enforce policy for users, applications and devices on the LAN.  With visibility and control delivered directly from the LAN infrastructure, IT can now become a contributor to the innovations of the core business and not a victim of them.