What Is Network Management? Meaning, Importance, and Techniques

By Networkbulls

Sep 7, 2023

Networking Blog...

Summary: Network management ensures seamless connectivity, security, and efficiency of a company's network infrastructure. It involves configuring, monitoring, and analyzing network performance. Techniques include fault management, configuration, accounting, performance, and security management, leveraging hardware, software, and automation.

What Is Network Management? Meaning, Importance, and Techniques

If you are working in the IT department of a company or organization, it is a prerequisite that you are well-trained in network management.

Your professional training, expertise and exposure to network management are needed by an organization as this system collects real-time data from switches, routers, access points and different devices like mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and desktops.

All network elements are directly and integrally linked to network management. This is due to the reason that your network system needs to be managed well to function at a fast speed, ensure security in the network, seamless connectivity of networking devices, reduce errors and help the corporate management take speedy decisions on business matters.

Network management is deployed in both cloud and hosted environments.

Meaning of Network Management

It means management of network tools, their application, overall operation and maintenance to make the network infrastructure fully secured against any intrusion. The basic purpose of deployment of networking management is to ensure that your network infrastructure functions seamlessly, smoothly and effectively.

Functionality-wise, the network management includes:

Launching the process of configuring, monitoring, and managing the performance of a network.
Using network management as a broad platform that IT and NetOps teams use to complete these jobs.
Fault analysis leveraging and performance management to maintain a healthy networking system.

Importance of Network Management

A network management system is very important as it enables a corporate company or any other organization to gain greater visibility into its specific and dedicated network. This can be done by identifying different devices that connect to the network seamlessly and monitoring traffic. Following are the main points of importance of network management system:

Optimize usage patterns

Identifying issues in a network and diagnosing them.
Prevent network disruptions.
Run a highly complex and distributed network smoothly.
Ensure security, control, and treatment of network data.

The essentiality of network management can be understood by the fact that the networks are turning highly complicated due to the use or deployment of a large number of devices and applications (connected to them grows).

Techniques of Network Management System

The techniques applied under network management are fault management, configuration, accounting, performance, and security management. There are sub-disciplines also for techniques that are adopted under the network management system.

Since network management is the core or backbone of your IT infrastructure, you can adopt the following five techniques for it:

1. Know Your Network & Its Inventory: As an enterprise network grows, its overall inventory is also added by new software, hardware, switches, routers and other components. Your best practice technique should be to create a list of components that are added to your inventory.

2. Leveraging of Both Hardware & Software Components: This technique is necessary as today’s networking, unlike the previous ones, has both hardware and advanced software. Earlier, it was hardware-based. Now you have cloud, AI-enabled software and other highly advanced software. You have to leverage both or all such techniques.

3. Management of Network Topology: You have to update your network topology to manage it efficiently. The organizational or enterprise network topology means the proper arrangement of different devices, network hardware and software. I an enterprise grows or merges with another company, this topology will change. You have to know the new topology.

4. Integration of Network Management Tools: You must avoid fragmentation of network management tools. Your tools must be integrated to reap the best benefit of seamless running of the network.

5. Resort to Automation: This can help you greatly in network management. Most of the corporate companies are now introducing automation. It is against this backdrop that the management of the network can be optimized by resorting to it.

In Conclusion

According to the US-based Grand View Research, the global network management system market size was estimated at USD 8.25 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.1% from 2023 to 2030.

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Your exposure to network management systems is needed to meet different aspects and challenges of hybrid work. The IT domain and overall working module in a corporate company now are turning hybrid throwing a major challenge to the network professionals.

This is due to the reason that the replacement of old and traditional working modules in a corporate company now stands replaced by a hybrid work environment. The hybrid system needs a highly distributed and mobile workforce. This, in turn, needs a high level of security, connectivity and collaboration and support. All these can be achieved through network management.