Using Facebook to Manage your Enterprise Network with Enterasys

A new way of managing your enterprise network is now available from Enterasys called Isaac. It is a social media interface for its NetSight network monitoring system. It was announced today and will be available next month, and is free until the end of the year and then $9,995 afterwards. It works with Salesforce’s Chatter, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and eventually will work with other vendors’ network monitoring equipment. Isaac is special software that runs on the Enterasys monitoring hardware as a separate module.

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Think of Isaac as another user interface to manage your network infrastructure, just like you would use a Web browser front end to set up monitoring and alerts. As more IT workers use social media for their personal lives, Enterasys is trying to leverage that experience to apply to managing complex networks. In the dark past, many of these management systems used complex command lines, and received notifications via email or SMS alerts when there are problems on their network. So social media is a natural next step in this user interface evolution, and it fits it quite nicely in our Internet of Things trendlet.

How does Isaac work? You first “friend” your network routers and switches and so forth on your social media account, and they Tweet or Facebook message you if you need any particular attention. You use natural language commands to talk to your network equipment to resolve problems or query particular reports (such as show me the top network ‘talkers’ or traffic generators across your network), and map these commands to particular workflow actions for each piece of networking gear that you want to control. You can have the same commands across all four social media networks, or can set up your separate commands for each social network.

Isaac, coming from a networking security vendor, is also set up for secure operations. It can make use of two-factor authentication to further increase security. Isaac can operate in read-only access too.

“We see the introduction of Isaac from Enterasys as a tremendous innovation that will make us even more nimble. We will now have the ability to respond in real-time to any problem with the network and can do so in an extremely customizable, secure and easy manner via social media,” says Phil Komarny, CIO of Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Penn. Enterasys will also demonstrate Isaac at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference later this summer.

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