While carrying out changes, most of the administrators document the proposed changes.

They login to each device separately and carry out the change. In case the configuration changes are not successful, they will turn it to the previous working state by undoing the changes as recorded by them in the documentation.

In big enterprises, with a large number of devices, the administrators cannot follow the 'change documentation' process. Instead, they develop custom scripts to push configurations to multiple devices. With the enormous diversity of hardware vendors, the administrators develop numerous custom scripts to suit the syntax of each device type.

Some others juggle with fragmented tools to do specific tasks in configuration management. They correlate the output from each tool manually.

Still worse, some administrators follow the haphazard ways of carrying out changes to live equipment, without any management plan. When errors in configuration cause network outage, they end up wishing that they could move the configuration back to a proper working version. They manually troubleshoot the cause.

Automating network configuration management, ensuring network compliance and security modern enterprises depend on network availability for business continuity. In heterogeneous networks, administrators face numerous challenges in properly managing device configurations, carrying out changes, and in minimizing network downtime triggered by human errors. It ensures that device configurations remain compliant to various standard practices and regulations could aid in minimizing network downtime, and thereby help the network remain in top shape. Automating the network configuration management is the means to achieve the above goal.

Managing the network is a challenging task as business continuity directly depends on network availability. The enterprise naturally puts the squeeze on the few network administrators mandating them with the responsibility of ensuring network availability. Not just network availability, but also ensuring security and reliability, optimizing performance, capacity and utilization of the network fall under the ambit of the administrators.

Ironically, most of the configuration changes are repetitive and labor-intensive tasks-for instance, changing passwords and access control lists. Yet, as even minor errors in configuration changes to the devices in production carry the risk of causing network outage, the skilled network administrators spend a significant part of their time on configuring the devices. They find it hard to concentrate on strategic network engineering and administration tasks.

It is evident that adminis­tra­tors face pressures from multiple angles; but, how do they normally manage configurations? Let's take a look at some of the traditional management policies.

The Way Out
Conquering the complex, multifa­ceted operational and techno­logical challenges of network configuration manage­ment is getting simpler nowadays with the availability of network change and configuration management (NCCM) solutions.

The NCCM solutions are designed to automate the entire lifecycle of device configuration management. The process of changing configurations, managing changes, ensuring compliance and security are all automated and the NCCM solutions prove to be powerful at the hands of network administrators.

By leveraging NCCM solutions, administrators can automate the entire compliance monitoring process, which will happen at all levels-on demand, automatically at regular intervals and whenever a change happens. Violations would immediately be escalated to the security personnel. Besides, comprehensive compliance reports could be generated for submission to compliance auditors. In addition, in the case of violations, remediation tips will also be offered. During planned configuration changes, NCCM solutions help check the syntax of the configuration changes for correctness before uploading them to the device.

Automating NCCM will not only help networks remain compliant to the policies, but also make the network remain in top shape. Compliance to best practices will just become a way of life.

With a good NCCM solution in place, enterprises can make best use of their network infrastructure. They can achieve increased network uptime and reduced degradation and performance issues.

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