The character of an enterprise network, as well as the sophistication of available network-analysis tools, has changed radically since the first use of Ethernet. Today, companies use the Internet for disseminating information and for e-commerce, affecting the amount of resources a corporation devotes to its network, as well as the importance the organization places on keeping its network running properly.
Along with the growth of network usage, there has been a corresponding increase in the availability of network-analysis and management tools. This is seen in the fragmented nature of the network-management industry; freeware analyzers, enterprise-class appliances and everything that falls in between are each jockeying for a place in the IT manager’s tool kit.
Yet, enterprise networks are more complex today than ever, and the data these networks transport has expanded to include peer to peer, voice over IP (VoIP), storage, Internet and a myriad of other applications. The meantime-to-resolution measurement (how long is necessary to fix a networking problem once it has occurred), a key statistic used by some organizations, has remained essentially unchanged, however.
There are online cost calculators that help estimate what an hour’s worth of network downtime might cost an organization. Typical considerations include lost productivity, missed sales opportunities and the possibility of losing an important customer account.
One estimate puts the cost of downtime at about $42,000 an hour for an average large business. Thus, if a business’ network availability was 99 percent for the entire year, it would still have experienced three days of downtime; this works out to a cost of more than $3 million.
In order to prevent these problems from occurring in the first place, corporate management should decide what specific tools are required and how much of the IT budget should be spent on equipment such as network tools. For example, an organization might budget…