SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Security management tools allow the network manager to restrict access to various resources, from the applications and files to the entire network itself; these generally offer password-protection schemes that give users different levels of access to different resources. For instance, a user in marketing could be allowed to view, or read a data file in accounting but not be permitted to change or write to it.

Security management is also important in managing the network itself – for instance, only certain individuals (such as network administrators) should be permitted to change configuration settings on a server or other key network devices.

Performance management tools produce real-time and historical statistical information about the network’s operation: how many packets are being transmitted at any given moment, the number of users logged into a specific server, and utilization of internetwork lines. As already noted, this type of information can help network administrators pinpoint areas or network segments that pose potential problems.

Most network operating systems (NOSs) provide some level of network management capabilities; in particular, almost all the leading NOSs offer password-protection schemes that limit users’ access to network resources. Novell, for instance, implements its NetWare management schemes through user profiles, which define not only the user’s access rights, but the users’ classifications (supervisor, workgroup manager, console operator, or user), which also determine the resources they can access.

In this scheme, a supervisor has access rights that allow reconfiguring and upgrading the entire system. The workgroup manager, available with NetWare 3.X, controls only the resources of a single user or user group. This concept allows a supervisor to distribute some of the responsibility for maintaining the network to others around a large network.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1043