Moving management to the Web

These are times that try the souls of network administrators. Faced with shrinking budgets and expanding networks and management, the last thing the IT community needed was a great new thing.

But that hasn't stopped the Internet and its corporate alter-ego--the intranet--from spreading to the enterprise management console like wildfire. The new big picture that faces information technology is a Web-based management world where an administrator can just browse the corporate network just as he can the Web with no more interoperability questions between management applications or the headaches of a variety of interfaces.

The problem is that, to achieve this, network administrators will have to endure another tiresome game of "Standards, standards, who sets the standards?"

Everybody who is anybody in enterprise network and systems management is already on the Web-based management bandwagon: Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and Tivoli Systems, are just a few of the headliners. (See illustration)

"Essentially, what we wanted to do is get into this fray," said Tim Reilly, director of network management at Bay Networks, referring to the recent flurry of announcements for Web-based management tools. (See chart for list of vendors)

Current implementations of Web-based management applications offer only incremental improvements. For example, a network administrator can use a browser to view an application that monitors network performance--but only for sections of the network. The great promise of the intranet is that it eventually will provide an administrator a single management console for the entire network, including applications from different vendors.

"Eventually, Web-based management will give you the ability to manage across the board from a single station," said Greg Howard, senior analyst at the Infonetics Research consultancy. "I'm pretty optimistic about it."

But to get there, someone must set some standards for interoperability. Sound familiar?