Lifecycle Management

As we all know, IT, Network and Service management is all about managing and preventing risks that interrupt the business. Businesses spend a lot of time and effort focusing on the Fault, Configuration and Performance management.

Lifecycle management, on the other hand, is often an, unfortunately, critical capability that is overlooked until you end up with a compliance issue, a maintenance bill for unsupported devices and or realise that your new strategy can’t accommodate devices that are either in an end of life “EOL” or end of support “EOS” state.

The problem

Experience tells us that administrators, are often focused on setting up networks, troubleshooting or resolving performance issues and it is not uncommon that compliance and monitoring the lifecycle/status of the estate becomes an annual “to-do” activity if you’re lucky. Hand on heart, we all know of cases when there has been a project that is going to upgrade something and then “discovers” some equipment that has been forgotten, which then holds up the project for a number of reasons and the reality is that the larger your infrastructure the more likely it is that this may occur.

An infrastructure that consists of tens, hundreds or thousands of devices, is not only difficult to manage, maintain, and report upon but also requires considerable effort and coordination with dedicated resources just to do so. Whilst there are some organizations that manage to maintain some data repositories for inventory, we find that it is often fragmented, inaccurate and out of date.

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