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Any of these cases would trigger the service provider’s “Immune System“, resulting in an array of projects that would bring data integrity back up, perhaps to the 80% level that represents typical best practices. If these “Get Well“ projects can be combined with “Stay Well“ processes, operations staff can focus on future growth.

Business as usual could continue, except for one important problem: next generation services require 100% accuracy on a very large number of configurable parameters. To illustrate this, consider two important examples: security configuration, and service assurance.

In the first example, a single security misconfiguration can result in:

• An interface that allows inappropriate connections
• Equipment login for factory-default access being accessible to the internet
• Access to private information that can be exploited by hackers.

Recent examples on PlayStation network and with “News of the World” indicate the seriousness with which these threats must be treated.

For our second example of why the status quo is no longer adequate, consider next generation service assurance. In a typical carrier environment, a service creation environment and service activation system manage the design and configuration of a service, including provisioning the service and setting up customer facing service assurance capabilities such as performance reporting and SLA enforcement. Provided the provisioning flows through without fallout, and all subsequent moves, adds, and changes are also automated, the configuration of a large number of components will have been orchestrated to deliver a sophisticated service with customer facing assurance capabilities. When fallout correction, break-fix cycles, or network upgrades require manual intervention however, all bets are off.

In both of these cases, anything less than 100% accuracy represents an unacceptable situation for the service provider. Only a holistic approach to network integrity, which combines analysis of network configuration data with the reconciliation of physical and logical inventory, can guarantee that services remain properly configured in the presence of these kinds of activity.

Bringing this kind of holistic approach to data integrity allows the same set of systems and processes to be applied to problems with physical inventory, logical inventory, and configuration management. The result is Network Integrity.

Physical inventory problems manifest themselves in poor asset utilization. Understanding which resources are available and which are in use allows service providers to manage acquisition of new resources and spare parts. Efficiency in this area results in lower maintenance costs, reduced inventory of spares, and higher return on capital. In one case, the savings resulting from aligning maintenance contracts with production resources was sufficient to pay for the entire lifecycle cost of the Network Integrity practice. The other benefits apply directly to the “bottom line“.