Taking IP From A Commodity To A Utility

Today's networks are part of a mission-critical IT infrastructure fabric. They provide the "dial tone" of IT — an always-on, always-available service for connecting to data and applications. But most companies don't invest in the infrastructure that's needed to support this dial tone. Forgotten services like DHCP, DNS, and RADIUS are critical network services components that dictate availability. Yet most are woefully out of date, stagnating on non-enterprise-grade infrastructure, with few security mechanisms. To prevent your network from becoming an IT bottleneck, you must build a utility-grade network; one where devices and services just plug in and work. How? By first transitioning your services off commodity hardware to newer appliances and, secondly, investing in the proper IP address management (IPAM) tools.