Service providers are seeing a significant uptick in new business from the public sector both in the United States and abroad. For instance, NETSAS, an IT network company, is growing its revenues because of contracts with the Australian government.
One project involved the installation of its flagship Enigma NMS product that manages and monitors an organization’s network infrastructure. “Enigma NMS was first deployed in the Queensland Department of Main Roads [Australia] . . . and proved to be a . . . success,” said CEO Mikhail Chelomanov in a May interview.
His company installed a bill validation module which reduced errors for thousands of customers. “Validating telecommunications bills is a specialized, labor intensive, tedious and error-prone activity. If the client doesn’t have the time, resources and tools to validate telecommunications bills, they are just being paid,” said Chelomanov.
However, data security and network integrity continue to be a problem for many government agencies. Many departments don’t have the budget, resources or technical skills to use emerging technologies that monitor their networks for vulnerabilities and threats.
Only 22 percent of agencies had met the original FISMA deadline for deploying a continuous monitoring system by September 2011, according to a survey released by RedSeal Networks. The FISMA deadline was extended to September 2012. Only 45 percent of federal agencies were able to comply by this date.
Many of the IT staff in government agencies continue to be bogged down by antiquated legacy systems that are incompatible with modern architectures and systems. Thus, network performance management becomes a problematic issue for organizations that must reconcile emerging technologies with legacy infrastructure, incompatible devices, and ineffective software.
A 2012 survey by SevOne found that 90 percent of IT managers “do not have confidence in themselves to find problems before users are impacted”. The findings found that the vast majority of IT departments have an inability to quickly detect problems in their network systems.