Competitive Analysis Data: Management Application Design and Security

Competitive Analysis Data:

Management Application Design and Security

When SmartMIB, SOSL, and IMMS were first designed; our development specialists realized that current planned IP management solutions won’t position Service Providers and Enterprises for future growth because they are:

• Internally focused. Network Administrators will build IP provisioning, billing, and customer care management systems for their own networks -- but these tools will not offer management features across multiple networks. AT&T’s internal systems will be useless when Gillette demands performance monitoring across multiple Network Administrators.

• Proprietary by design. Network Administrators expect to create differentiation by customizing off-the-shelf tools, but this approach will further limit interoperability between different Networks or between the managed zones within an enterprise. If a carrier modifies the way front-office apps like Remedy accept trouble tickets, it will take weeks of custom coding before any partner can link to its customer care system -- even if the partner also uses Remedy software.

• Inflexible. Network Administrators have built management systems by cobbling together best-of-breed software packages with spaghetti code. The result? Innovation rates plummet because making any change requires launching a full-scale integration project. To upgrade to the latest version of Portal Software’s billing software, a carrier will need to recode all the links between Portal’s software and other packaged software in the OSS.

• Insecure. Traditionally NMS and the SNMP protocol have been synonymous with clear text open community strings being transferred on the wire as well as saved in the databases of NMS applications without any encryption. In other words; Known and widely used NMS applications are severely unsecured. Historically “compromised security” was sold to customers as the cost of doing network management. Security of SNMP was introduced through SNMP Version 3. Hence the significance of SNMPv3 support is really critical for building secured solutions. It is interesting to mention here that NO serious SNMPv3 based NMS application solutions are available in the market today.

	Current/existing Planned IP management systems	*SmartMIB* management system
Management Focus	Monitors Only within Campus	Monitors across multiple carrier networks or Campuses
Proprietary Management Design	Proprietary by design. Manages only proprietary hardware devices	un-proprietary by design. Manages all devices that are industry compliant
Flexibility of Management Design	Inflexible. Requires heavy integration	Very flexible as it is open source in terms of the management processes
Secured Management Traffic	Most applications lack support for (Large scale) securing of management traffic.	Administrator control over what to secure and when to secure the specific management traffic
Selective Device based Security	Not Possible	This is a feature available by design

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