It’s that time of year when every research organisation and tech magazine is sharing their top trends for 2019.  When it comes to IT Infrastructure and Operations Management trends, the focus is on catering for larger, more diverse networks and ensuring security and compliance as more and more ‘things’ are connected to an enterprise network.

According to Gartner’s Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations for 2019 Network Agility (or lack of?) and Digital Diversity Management should be key focus areas for this year.

Network agility (or lack of?)

Moving forward we will continue to see our networks underpinning critical business processes across a broader range of connected devices.  Network teams over the past few years have been focused on increasing availability but to ensure future success the focus needs to go beyond this and on to how all network operations can be performed at greater speed.  RPA and building greater network agility that delivers automation and orchestration is key to success in this area.

“Network teams must collaborate heavily with other business units as new opportunities in 5G and edge computing arise”

As cloud-based infrastructure becomes more prevalent and the scale of ‘things’ and endpoints increase, networks will need to evolve to cope with the increased stress that it will create on the network.

Digital diversity management

When Gartner refers to Digital diversity management, they are not talking about people, but rather the growing combination of new, obscure and ageing assets and technologies that are now being utilised within modern organisations.

”The importance of identifying, discovering and monitoring those that directly impact or support the business cannot be understated”

Maintaining accurate inventory and ensuring visibility and management of assets are major challenges that will emerge between 2020 and 2025.

What can I do to get ahead of the trend?

Opmantek software leads the way in IT Audit and Network Automation and Management for large and diverse networks. With over 10,000 hardware vendors preconfigured and a unique device modelling feature that enables you to discover, monitor and manage ANY DEVICE.  For a free demonstration on how Opmantek Software can help you gain control of the networks of the future fill out the form below.

As the world becomes more and more connected telecommunications, internet, and managed service providers must compete with one another to provide the fastest, most affordable, and cutting-edge services.

Traditionally these industries have been heavily laden with rules, requirements, and regulations that have resulted in large volumes of manual operational processes focused towards managing data, controlling cost and business efficiency, and developing new services.  Adhering to these processes can be so time-consuming that it prevents these service providers from focusing on the most critical aspect of their business: their customers.

In recent years, however, technologies have evolved to a point that networks can now be more digital and as a result, more dynamic, flexible, and customisable. The use of Robotic Process Automation can make systems intelligent and more automated, enabling predictive and near-real-time actions. These systems, when coupled with an agile management model, can have a massive impact on response times, time to root cause, and preventative remediation reducing costs while improving customer experience.

What Is RPA?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities into a computer or robot, to carry out repetitive tasks, manipulate data and communicate with digital systems in order to improve efficiency and performance.

Image Source: Deloitte

RPA Adoption In Numbers

In September 2017, Deloitte invited organisations globally to take part in an online survey on their use of RPA.  They received responses from over 400 organizations across many industries with a combined value of $1.8 trillion. The information was then analysed and published in a 2018 report titled “The robots are ready. Are you? Untapped advantage in your digital workforce.”

The report revealed the massive extent to which organisations are using RPA to improve business efficiencies.  RPA projects consistently outperformed expectations on non-financial benefits such as accuracy, timelines, flexibility, and improved compliance, with at least 85% of respondents reporting that RPA met or exceeded their expectations in these areas. In addition, a total of 61% reported their expectations of cost reduction were being met or exceeded. Some highlighted the fact that this enabled them to move people from performing transactional tasks to higher-value activities that also led to greater job satisfaction.

Expectations were also exceeded when it came to the FTE capacity that could be provided by robots. Most organisations in implementing RPA forecast it could replace around 20% of existing human tasks. In fact, those that have scaled RPA appear to have had such a positive experience that their expectations are even more ambitious: they believe that 52% of FTE capacity could be provided by robots. This can enable the human workforce to be redeployed to more value-adding activities.

“RPA augments what our people do: it supplements their capability, it means that they can focus on things that are more value added, that are more interesting.”   Shared Services Director, Multinational building-materials company

RPA – A Telco’s Best Friend

In the managed IT Services and Telecommunications industries, RPA is being rapidly adopted as a key strategy to help with enterprise planning to improve networks, including changes to performance management, network design, and network digitization.

Software providers such as Opmantek recognised early the opportunity for Managed Service Providers, Telcos and even centralised IT departments to utilise RPA to leverage the volumes of network data their monitoring systems were collecting to drive operational insights (predictive analytics) and to increase impact from this data significantly by combining it with Cognitive Automation – applying machine learning techniques to automate responses to trends and anomalies, based on the laws of probabilities.

Across some of the worlds largest and most complex telecommunications and enterprise networks, the sentiments and improvements recorded company-wide in the Deloitte survey are similarly reflected in the cost savings, service improvements and reassignment of skilled engineers from repetitive, mundane tasks to more specialised and impactful areas of the business.  

For these service providers, the operational tasks of IT teams have altered significantly, with RPA taking care of procedural and budgetary adherence and human resources now able to focus on every business’ top priority: customers.

Start exploring how RPA will work in your organisation by downloading the Opmantek Virtual Machine today and activating your free license for up to 20 devices.  If you would prefer to have an engineer walk you through the software, fill out the form below.

Opmantek has always believed that all of your solutions should be connected and working together towards a single goal, maintaining a better network. Working together with new customers, our engineers love creating automated solutions that help solve their networking issues. With this in mind, Mark Henry, Opmantek’s Senior Systems Engineer, has put together a webinar series that will leverage opEvents and opConfig to help assist in the development of Operational Process Automation (OPA) that is tailored to your business.

This five-part series leverages opEvents, opConfig and NMIS to help facilitate automation into your organization. Using the points in the webinars you will be able to help progress your organization from a level 0/1 on the Gartner IT service management maturity model to a level 3/4.

The webinars range from 30 minutes to 60 minutes, they are full of information so be prepared to take notes. If you wish to follow along with the slides, they all will be at the bottom of this post. You can download both products free and use them with a lifetime 20 device licence, we also curate a virtual machine that has all our downloadable modules preinstalled and ready to go.

2. Collecting Non-SSH/Telnet device configurations

Webinar Page

opConfig 3.1.1 introduced the ability to collect or transform configuration data using a plugin architecture. This new feature can collect/transform configuration data from devices that do not have a traditional command-line interface (CLI) accessed through SSH/Telnet.
The second webinar will look at:

• How to architect and implement an opConfig Plugin.
• Methods for shelling out from the plugin to another program and handle returned data.
• Create a simple plugin to read and parse a file (i.e. CSV, TXT, JSON, XML, etc) into actionable data.
• How to transform configuration data with a plugin.
• How to raise and manage NMIS alerts.

3. Responding to Unauthorized Configuration Changes using opConfig and opEvents

Webinar Page

It happens all the time, an engineer shifts a setting for troubleshooting and forgets to put it back when he’s done. Another configures a device from memory, rather than the checklist, and a device gets deployed with a default password still in effect. Across town, an employee brings a wireless router into work and plugs it into his cubical port so he can have access around the office.
The third webinar looks at these issues:

• How to configure opConfig to collect device configurations and raise alerts to NMIS.
• How and when to take action on reported configurations changes.
• How to leverage opConfig’s setting push capability in response to an event.

4. Expanding on SNMP/WMI Collection with NMIS Collect Plugins

Webinar Page (there are no slides for this webinar)

Opmantek’s award-winning performance and fault monitoring system, NMIS, collects device data using SNMP and WMI polling, processes incoming SNMP traps, and conducting service monitoring. When that isn’t enough, you can expand on device Collection using NMIS Collect Plugins.
This webinar you will discover:

• How and When NMIS Collect Plugs can be used.
• The Four vital limitations of Collect Plugins, and why they matter.
• How to build your first Collect Plugin in just five minutes.

5. Managing Complex Event Responses

Webinar Page

This webinar introduces the concept of using opEvent’s Actions to create a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) that handles troubleshooting and event remediation. A CAS is any system made up of independent operators or agents. Each agent does one or two very well defined operations independently from the rest of the system. With this pattern, you will be able to quickly build a responsive event handling system that is customized to how your organization works and learns.

The final webinar covers:

• Core concepts of a CAS system and how implementing it will improve maintainability and scalability of the solution.
• Methods for designing the overall event escalation system – How to create useful troubleshooting scripts, including collecting device configuration information, for every event.
• Building notification routines to handle all situations; after hours, weekends, vacations, and non-response.
• Expanding actions to proactively respond to events; reconfiguring devices (using opConfig), restarting services, and leveraging APIs.

Conclusion

There was a lot of information to digest in these webinars, but if you took the time and implemented the learning into your operating environment your ability to use OPA will be further along than any of your competitors.

Follow along with the slides:

• Webinar 1 – Advanced Diagnostics and Network Automation with opEvents
• Webinar 2 – Collecting Device Configurations
• Webinar 3 – Responding to Unauthorized Configuration Changes
• Webinar 5 – Managing Complex Event Responses

It’s been another great year for Opmantek Software with our products again proving to be a favourite with MSPs and large scale organisations.  We have loved working with the community this year and delivering a variety of awesome new features and improvements that continue our tradition of delivering software that is easier to implement, more scalable, more flexible, able to operate in more diverse environments, saves time and provides faster ROI than our competitors.  Here are a few of our awesome product team’s accomplishments in 2018.

Real time delivery of the information you want to see.

Open-AudIT continued to go from strength to strength in 2018, with new enterprise features making the automation of network auditing and compliance even simpler and the presentation of key information more streamlined.

Custom dashboards were added in version 2.2 allowing users to present interactive real-time charts and graphs of the information that they care most about. For auditing teams, the dashboards may be focused on devices not seen.  For security teams, it may be file changes that are the focus.

Open-AudIT also reached for the cloud, with new AWS auditing features.

With the recent onslaught of weather events to hit North America, I would be remiss to not bring up events that we have the ability to control. Network events can storm a control center and often lead to support teams being inundated with support tickets. Every engineer has felt this way at some point where control has slipped and you are just reacting to anything that comes your way.

These times should reinforce the need to turn your operational environment from a reactive atmosphere to a more controlled, proactive environment. One of the easiest ways to start this process is by implementing opEvents and leveraging the built-in event deduplication, correlation and synthetic event features.

A clearer example of how these features would operate in an environment can be theorised based on the weather mentioned above. For example, you may have to monitor two data centers located in the United States, one in Chicago and one in Miami. You are quite lucky because you are based in Australia where it is summer and very warm in comparison.

During the night, there have been major issues in the Chicago data center and there are a number of devices that have been experiencing issues. With this in mind, it would be desirable to have a single alert that notifies us that the Chicago site is experiencing a problem, versus many (10 ~ 500+) alerts from individual nodes.  This would cut down on the noise and it would also automate a component of the troubleshooting process, enabling your team to focus in on a common symptom in order to remedy the problem.

All the tools to set up this process are standard features that ship with opEvents. The process takes into account three key features that will increase the intelligence and automation surrounding your event management; Event deduplication, event correlation and synthetic event generation.

Event Deduplication

The principle behind event deduplication is that if there are two events that have occurred, in a given window, that are considered identical, you should only be notified once. opEvents handles this out of the box and it is really valuable when similar events are re-occurring, such as node flapping. This type of deduplication is essential for dealing with event storms; it is therefore always active and non-adjustable.

Event Correlation

Similar to how event deduplication will reduce the number of your events, the in-built event correlation rules will also help reduce mass event notifications. The correlation engine can group events together based on a number of different factors, such as event type, location, name or customer. When a combination of events occurs a synthetic event will be generated.

Synthetic Event Generation

A synthetic event is an event that has been intelligently created by the system that is a combination of multiple other events. Once synthetic events are created in your system you will now log into a system that will provide you with knowledge and not just data.

Imagine after your morning coffee, logging into your event management software and seeing one event, ‘Chicago Site Issues’ or similar compared to logging in and seeing hundreds of notifications and flashing lights. Not only is this a lot easier on the stress levels, but you will also be able to solve the issue at hand quicker due to the focused wisdom that has been generated.

Next Steps:

• Download opEvents on our Virtual Machine and start monitoring nodes with a free lifetime license.
• Read more about Deduplication and storm control in opEvents.
• Read more about Event Correlation.
• Read our Solution Guide – Event Consolidation Based on Location.

Cybercrime is on the rise – attacks are becoming more frequent, methods more sophisticated, and impacts more severe. And while tools and technologies go a long way in protecting your business data and IT infrastructure, effective planning is also vital to risk mitigation and management.

A cyber security incident response plan can help you protect and restore business operations when and if an attack occurs. With new threats continuing to emerge, it is not only critical for your business to have a cyber security incident response plan, but for it to be regularly reviewed and updated. An outdated plan is rarely useful to anyone.

Here are five tips for staying on top of your cyber security incident response plan:

1.   Update your list of critical systems and information
A catalogue of your organisation’s most vital digital assets is an important tool for prioritising incident response efforts. Over time, your systems will inevitably change so make sure this is echoed in your plan.

2.   Update threat-specific responses
Your incident response plan needs to change to reflect the current cyber threat landscape. Remember, last year’s biggest threat may not be this year’s.

3.   Keep your contact list current
You want to be able to get in touch with the right people in a timely fashion when responding to an incident, and keeping your contacts list up-to-date is the first step for doing this.

4.   Document your discoveries
Simulated cyber attacks are an effective, proactive and risk-free way of identifying any deficiencies in your network. But you need to capture and document the results and key learnings along the way.

5.   Communicate updates to your plan
Any significant changes to your cyber security incident response plan should be shared with relevant team members.

Conclusion

While a robust cyber incident response plan can help reduce your exposure to cyber risks and mitigate the damage from cyber attacks, its efficacy is contingent upon up-to-date information. Ongoing tweaks and refinements will go a long way in helping to bolster your cyber posture.

FirstWave protects businesses and government organisations of all sizes from risk by providing rapid and affordable access to the most advanced, comprehensive and adaptive cloud-based cyber security solutions available. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help your organisation get on the front foot against cyber threats.