Network infrastructure is a set of software and hardware components that help build, run, and maintain an IT network.
What is network infrastructure management?
Network administrators implement network infrastructure management practices to ensure the network operates optimally by identifying performance bottlenecks, remediating problems, and determining the need for scaling to support growing business operations.
Overall, network infrastructure management focuses on five aspects of networking:
- Network Infrastructure Monitoring: A network infrastructure monitoring system continuously monitors the network and reports problems. For example, a router may be receiving more traffic than it can handle and crashes, impacting network availability.
- Configuration Management: This aspect focuses on ensuring network devices are configured with best practices, patched, upgraded, or replaced when needed. Usually, network administrators leverage automation tools to track and manage configuration changes more effectively when managing more extensive IT networks.
- Performance Management: This aspect focuses on analyzing a network and maintaining a required network performance level to ensure business operations aren’t negatively impacted. Some of the critical metrics relevant to performance management include available network capacity, bandwidth utilization, latency, and throughput, among others.
- Fault Management: This aspect helps identify problems in an IT network and determine root causes to fix issues from recurring. Some tools even apply automated remediation through pre-defined playbooks when a problem occurs, improving efficiency and meaning time to recovery (MTTR).
- Security Management: Since an IT network is critical to business operations, it is imperative to ensure its protected from various network-based threats and block malicious attempts to gain unauthorized access. Network administrators can use firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and log traffic monitoring tools to help ensure the network is safe and attacks are identified and blocked quickly.
What does a network infrastructure consist of?
Network infrastructure can be a mix of hardware devices, software applications, and network services, including:
- Hardware infrastructure typically includes routers, switches, hubs, repeaters, gateways, bridges, and modems.
- Software infrastructure includes monitoring and management tools and operating systems.
- Network services include networking protocols such as TCP, UDP, and IP addressing.
An organization can extend its IT network by integrating with third-party services from managed service providers (MSPs) or build hybrid network infrastructure by integrating on-premises infrastructure with cloud services.
