Network Configuration & Change Management using StableNet^®

StableNet^® – NCCM & VLM White Paper

Network infrastructure is evolving at an unprecedented rate and management of those systems has become a labor-intensive exercise. Unlike Fault and Performance Management, Network Configuration Change Management and (NCCM) Vulnerability & Lifecycle Management (VLM) have no common harmonized management methods or protocols.

This White Paper will provide you with an insight on how to address these mission-critical tasks in your network infrastructure.

Discovery & Network Inventory

The StableNet^® discovery engine has a unique mechanism. When discovering a network, it intelligently prioritizes each device it discovers and assigns a weight value that automatically maps its hierarchical relationship and overall importance within the network topology. The discovery process includes the capability for extracting all of the devices hardware and software inventory data, including network relationship information.

Section 2.1 of the White Paper provides greater insight into the key features around the hardware, software, and network discovery. Detailed inventory reporting can be produced and scanning of lifecycle and vulnerability announcements can be analyzed and reported against

Device Configuration Backup

The configuration backup functionality of StableNet^® is a fully flexible system that supports multi-protocol access for entry into multi-vendor telecom, service provider and enterprise network infrastructures. Typically, StableNet^® is integrated with your authentication system, i.e. TACACS+, Radius, LDAP, where the access credentials are configured for StableNet^® to gain authenticated access into multi-vendor infrastructures. Device backup file formats supported include text-based configuration, typically found on Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, Brocade, and binary file formats typically found on Ixia, Bluecoat, and F5 infrastructure device types. StableNet^® also supports a number of access protocols in order to ensure every requirement access type is supported, i.e. SSH Telnet, TFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, XML etc.

Enabling of Real-Time Configuration Change Detection

Configuration compliance policy for SNMP and syslog is essential for the assurance of receiving notifications of changes to device configuration. Unauthorized configuration changes are common practice within all sizes of business and so it is extremely important to have the necessary controls in place to notify and mitigate if a change was committed, what devices the change was committed to, and who performed the change. By having the ability to perform these key actions, you will be able to remediate known changes with ease, control your infrastructure estate with a higher degree of knowledge of what is being changed, correlate actual change configuration with approved change control processes, and maintain a higher level of service availability as a direct result of having this practice in place.

Many organizations today have configuration and security policy rules that require compliance checking to ensure consistency with design standards, processes, and directives with internal and external regulators. Using manual processes is not recommended, as it is time-intensive, costly, inaccurate and more importantly, your business could be at risk and open to potential attacks through not having the desired real-time visibility.

The policy compliance and governance engine within the NCCM module of StableNet^® allows corporations to create policies electronically in order to scan/analyze configurations of the infrastructure environment so as to produce accurate and timely compliance and violation reporting analytics.