[January 25, 2010] Netcordia Predicts Top Causes of IT Headaches in 2010 Tweet ANNAPOLIS, Md. --(Business Wire)-- Drawing from a customer community of thousands of network managers, Netcordia (News - Alert) predicts four IT trends that will expose network infrastructure vulnerabilities, cause budget overages, and put projects at-risk in 2010: 1. High-profile virtualization projects will go awry because of precarious underlying network infrastructure. Dynamic reallocation of services creates a huge challenge for the underlying infrastructure. Pre-virtualization, managing applications was difficult enough, but now the challenge is much more complex when servers are virtualized, and the connective network infrastructure is segmented. As services are provisioned or moved, the network needs to adapt accordingly. In virtual environments, network engineering teams need to deal with maintaining virtual topologies that provision and maintain topologically correct VRF, VLAN, and other configurations consistent and aligned with the virtual contexts of routers, firewalls, servers and other components to ensure end-to-end service reliability, dynamically. All too often, virtualization project planning simply overlooks the new challenges associated with managing the underlying network and teams find themselves unable to keep up. 2. At least five high-profile outages will strike by July. In 2009, Google (News - Alert), BlackBerry, and the New York Stock Exchange experienced how latent network configuration errors surface at the most inconvenient times. With the rise of virtualization and data center consolidation, a single issue will impact more users, so expect more outages of this nature in 2010. Companies without a proactive and automated way to detect and correct network configuration problems pay the price when traffic surges, new application roll-outs, or any other infrastructure changes expose dormant issues. 3. Compliance issues will cause hefty fines - and job losses. Achieving compliance, proving it, and staying compliant 24/7 will escalate from a headache into a budget line-item, putting jobs on the line. PCI (News - Alert), SOX, GLBA, and HIPAA compliance requirements all drill deep into network policies and configurations, and authorities are moving to a zero-tolerance approach to non-compliance in 2010. 4. Rising merger and acquisition (M&A) activity will take a heavy toll on IT departments. As the economy rebounds, corporate mergers and acquisitions will increase, causing new problems for organizations who must integrate different equipment, standards, processes and best practices. This will cause new stress and additional burdens for IT teams, as organizations attempt to wring the cost savings and synergies from an acquisition as fast as possible while dealing with the realities of highly inconsistent network configurations. "With the potential for network errors to wreak havoc in 2010, network managers will play a crucial role to navigate these potential pitfalls," said Don Pyle, Netcordia's CEO. "Based on what's at stake, here are two more predictions: network managers' work week will increase 20% - a full day - and ultimately, the network management role will finally get the respect it deserves." Netcordia Turns Network Management Proactive With two major releases to its flagship NetMRI software in 2009, Netcordia helps thousands of network managers end the cycle of fire-fighting, instill gold-standard policy compliance across complex information networks, and make troubleshooting a proactive and prioritized process. The company achieved key milestones in 2009 including: Product innovation: NetMRI 4 gives network administrators a crystal-clear picture of every change made on the network, shows its impact on interdependent systems, and creates a ‘hot' list of likely problems. It's also ideally suited to support both physical and virtual network infrastructures - managing the most complex infrastructure configurations that drive today's virtualized data centers. Downloadable, free trial: Skeptical buyers experience NetMRI's best-in-class detection and set a path to improve network health within 20 minutes of download. Bundled with software, OS and database, NetMRI can run as a virtual appliance on a VMWare™ environment. With a 30-day trial of NetMRI, network managers catch lurking configuration issues which - if left unchecked - will cause a network outage, compliance to fail, or performance to drag. NetMRI for MSPs: Netcordia's NetMRI Operations Center helps managed service providers (MSPs) offer competitive and higher value services over basic fault and performance management, including configuration standardization and compliance and configuration optimization by proactively identify customer issues, remotely and/or locally respond faster, and easily scale the number of devices under management - while reducing their effort and cost. Flexible licensing and multi-tenant views allow MSPs to dynamically allocate management licenses as clients and needs change. Channel Partnerships Grow: Netcordia significantly expanded its reseller channel, and launched a new partner portal - enabling partners to deliver customizable services that integrate into a company's network operations activities, maximizing client value. Strategic Partnerships: Netcordia launched a series of strategic partnerships delivering state-of-the-art integrated technology solutions. Partnerships included alliances with Hitachi Data Systems - creating the first available end-to-end monitoring and management solution for the mid-market VMWare - giving customers the best-in-class means to download and run NetMRI - and easily scale their use of the tool with additional licenses whenever needs expand - without being tied to a physical appliance McAfee (News - Alert) e/PO - providing industry's first two-way exchange of security events enhancing visibility into vulnerabilities and threats. Joint customers of Netcordia and its technology alliances protect data center operations, improve infrastructure security, and ensure high network availability without having to make piecemeal downloaded management tools work together. VoIP Expertise: Netcordia won a patent for its technique to find and diagnose problems in voice-over-IP networks, speeding the time required to identify the root cause of VoIP network performance degradation and speed resolution. Awards from Red Herring (News - Alert), Inc, and Deloitte: A recession-proof value proposition and customer-centric approach landed Netcordia on 3 elite lists in 2009: Deloitte's 2009 Technology Fast 500™ List, Inc. Magazine's 500 fastest growing privately held companies, the Red Herring 100. About Netcordia Netcordia is a leading provider of network administration software to the world's most complex and mission-critical networks. Its award-winning NetMRI network change and configuration management (NCCM) link to solution continuously audits multi-vendor infrastructures, identifies anomalies early and speeds resolution. Netcordia helps leading healthcare, managed service providers, financial services, academic, and government organizations stretch IT budgets, improve overall performance, meet corporate policy and comply with stringent federal regulations. Founded in 2000, Netcordia is headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland, and ranks on the Red Herring 100, the Inc. 500 and the Deloitte Fast 500 lists. For more information, visit http://www.netcordia.com. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]