Announcing IBM Network Health Check
Authored by John Christensen
Today, IBM is announcing the availability of Network Health Check for Cisco, a remote assessment service aiming to provide a comprehensive report on the status of the network infrastructure. For industries like healthcare, education, and government, maintaining a high performance network, network availability and reliability is key. These organizations need to proactively mitigate the risks of unplanned downtime and security threats to ensure they can continue delivering critical services to their customers or constituents.
Proactive Network Maintenance is Essential
In today's business landscape, where IT budgets are tightening and operational efficiency is paramount, organizations are increasingly focusing on optimizing their technology infrastructure to enhance productivity. At IBM, we know our clients are on a journey to modernize and upgrade IT environments to a hybrid cloud with AI infused throughout. This transformation requires a robust high performance enterprise network design to deliver on all the potential benefits of this architecture. Networking technology is the backbone of IT infrastructure, enabling the connections between and across systems and applications.
Organizations also must balance a proactive security strategy, preparing for threats to IT infrastructure. According to the 2023 Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index, only “15% of organizations globally are deemed to have a mature level of preparedness to handle the security risks of our hybrid world.” A proactive approach to assessing networking environments for performance issues, unplanned downtime and upcoming suggested technology upgrades can help stop a cyber-attack before it starts. However, many IT teams in these organizations focus on the day-to-day mission critical business priorities versus spending time proactively monitoring networking environments.
“As a trusted lifecycle services partner, IBM plays a pivotal role in empowering our customers with the essential tools to build a network that keeps business running smoothly," remarked Denzil Samuels, Global Vice President of CX Partner Success. "IBM’s 'Network Health Check' is an invaluable resource for clients seeking personalized insights into their networking environment. Whether prioritizing concerns related to security, performance, or overall hardware health, this service offers a tailored solution to ensure the optimal functioning of their network infrastructure."
IBM Network Health Check is designed to help avoid network problems through preemptive identification of network exposures. The IBM architect team will provide personalized recommendations aimed to increase network stability and reduce downtime, risk, and potential losses. Clients can choose a tailored set of services within Network Health Check depending on their interests and needs. Options include an Infrastructure Coverage Assessment, Hardware Health Assessment, Security – Advisories Assessment, Security – Configuration Based Threat Assessment and Network Topology Map.
Network Health Check utilizes several data collection and analysis tools to automate the process and ensure proper collection of data while delivering this service, including Cisco Common Services Platform Collector (CSPC), IBM Support Insights, IBM SevOne Network Performance Monitoring and Data Insights tools. Additional tools can be used for specific assessments.
Driving consistency across technology environments
Network Health Check offers a comprehensive, personalized report for clients about their Cisco networking infrastructure. Having clear insight into networking environments is essential to develop a positive, proactive security posture as well as ensure system performance. Network Health Check is part of IBM’s broader Technology Lifecycle Services portfolio of services, support and insights for multivendor data center environments—including servers, storage, networking, security and software.
For additional automated insights into IT environments as a whole, IBM Support Insights provides visibility into data centers and IT environments via AI to improve IT reliability and streamline asset management. A cloud-based service, Support Insights acts as a single pane of glass that unifies the support experience across IBM and multi-vendor infrastructure.
To learn more about Network Health Check and other TLS offerings, reach out to your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner for more information or explore the IBM Technology Lifecycle Services website.
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