Moderne løsninger for management av sammensatte kommunikasjonsinfrastrukturer

The Norwegian Armed Forces are increasingly dependent on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to be able to succeed in their missions. For ICT services to work, a communications infrastructure able to transmit information between the users of the service must be in place.

Management of a communications infrastructure includes a series of tasks with the common goal to ensure that the services produced on the communications infrastructure perform as expected over time. Adequate technical solutions for management of the infrastructure enable rapid delivery of new services, rapid reconfiguration to meet changed requirements, provide good situational awareness of the quality of the services’ performance and enable the proper troubleshooting actions to be taken. All of these properties are necessary in order to support the Norwegian Armed Forces in their missions in peace, crisis and war scenarios.

When one observes the totality of communications networks the Norwegian Armed Forces use to deliver services to their users, it is evident that this infrastructure is far from uniform since it

• consists of elements from both newer and older technology generations,
• contains networks belonging to multiple classification levels,
• consists of both stationary and mobile communications networks, and
• consists of networks owned by different organizations.

These issues all make the task of designing systems to effectively manage the entire communications infrastructure challenging. This report contains high level suggestions to how technical management systems for the composite communications infrastructure of the Norwegian Armed Forces may be built. The suggestions are based on frameworks and standards under development in the civilian sector.

An important part related to the topic of network management is to choose the level of ambition for management. There may be many different systems needed to handle different aspects of network management. Each system may be expensive and it can be challenging to integrate all these systems to an overall satisfactory solution. In this report, a relatively high level of ambition is assumed. The report concludes that it is challenging today to achieve unified management of composite communications infrastructure. However, recent developments in technologies and emerging frameworks and standards can simplify this challenge.

The report recommends the Norwegian Armed Forces first choose a level of ambition for management and thereafter define a target architecture based on their level of ambition. For the challenges that cannot be overcome with today’s systems, it is recommended to monitor closely the development of management systems. When acquiring network equipment today it is recommended to ensure this equipment has interfaces that allow them to be monitored by future management systems.