Strengthening Defence

INTRODUCTION

In the nineties, with the advent of the World Wide Web, globally there emerged a trend of increased deployment of IT by governments. Infact, most of the governments, weighed down by the rising expectations and demands of a highly aware citizenry, willingly decided to believe that there can be a new definition of public governance characterised by enhanced efficiency, transparency, accountability and a citizen-orientation in the adoption of IT enabled governance.

The emerging trend of IT deployment by governments translates itself to a march towards better and efficient governance mechanisms by enabling amongst others, an increased number of informative forums that facilitate several useful government to citizen interactions.

e-GOVERNANCE MARKET DRIVERS

Though e-Government is still in its infancy, over 20 states/union territories already have an IT policy in place. In terms of basic computerisation, police departments, treasury, land records, irrigation, justice and online customer service centres are seen as having the maximum potential.

Various state governments have already expanded their network (WAN, LAN, Wireless, Voice) to facilitate wider reach of all e-Governance projects/initiatives. Several district headquarters are in various stages of usefully implementing computerisation to have an online centralised mechanism for data sharing.

There are several demands from all government sectors for efficient infrastructure management initiatives to proactively monitor and ensure zero downtime of mission critical applications. Also the legacy systems and the roll-outs of new applications, compels a centralised end-to-end monitoring system to address all key domains including networks, systems, database, application, middle-ware, wireless, voice infrastructure, IP and Non IP devices.

EMS SOFTWARE

Enterprise Management System (EMS) software helps organisations to efficiently and effectively manage Information Technology (IT) resources, tasks and processes in order to meet the ever-shifting business requirements, and deliver flexible and responsive IT Service Management (ITSM), while helping to reduce costs. The EMS portfolio spans software for Networks (Voice, Data, and Wireless), security, compliance, storage, performance, availability, configuration, operations and IT life-cycle management, and should be backed by world-class services, support and research.

Perceived Value Proposition

Apart from the scalability and extensibility of the solution, the list  below indicates the key value propositions, which should be factored in, while going in for an EMS:

  • Completely Vendor Independent
  • Network Management system (Layer 1 to Layer 7 support)
  • Solution for Wireless Networks
  • Complete Lifecycle of Asset Management (Assets Include IT and Non

    • –IT) and Software Asset Management
    • Provisioning (OS on bare metal remotely)
    • Industry standard and ITIL Compliant Helpdesk software
    • Log Trail Management
    • Application dependency discovery without agents strengthens the CCMDB for any dynamic changes.
    • Offers True Business Service Management (BSM)
    • Automates workflows/processes (Information Technology Infrastructure Library, ITIL) through process managers by integrating the Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) and Operational Management products seamlessly.

    SOLUTIONS FOR GOVERNMENT

    The vendor’s portfolio should deliver to federal, state and local government agencies with cost-effective, monitoring and management of critical applications, and network-based systems. These solutions should help government agencies to meet requirements for defence, homeland security, intelligence and civilian initiatives. It should be highly scalable and provide rapidly deployable solutions that deliver end-to-end IT service management, problem isolation, and automation to help government agencies operate more effectively.

    Civilian Services

    The EMS solution should help agencies support key drivers of government transformation. This simplifies the management of complex infrastructures, helping agencies to centralise the control of IT silos and bring new services and programmes on-line more quickly. By supporting the monitoring of both civilian and inter-government services and programmes, these solutions help agencies improve reliability of critical applications and services. Easily deployable, they should provide a solid foundation to integrate legacy applications and new IT resources into a single ‘pane of glass’ for improved operational efficiency.
    Compliance and Standards

    Industry standards such as the Federal Enterprise Architecture and ITIL are playing an increasingly significant role in how agencies manage information technology. By adopting these standards and best practice methodologies like ITIL for IT service management and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) for improved IT controls, government agencies can better align IT with their business objectives.

    EMS SOLUTIONS FOR DEFENCE

    In the case of defence sector, the global trends in terms of expectations are as follows:

    • Electronic / network warfare – now regarded as absolutely critical
    • Increasing diversity in defence missions demands greater agility and integration, without cost and complexity
    • Mission assurance of network, rationalisation of Infrastructure, Application, Networks and Commu-nications, retain silo/point solutions (where needed) but consolidate event and alerts via a ‘manager of managers’
    • Increased need for store and forward capability, especially for deployed land and sea elements, Network Enabled Capability (NEC)
    • Real-time e2e Management

    This clearly states that whatever the business, there is a constant transformation that demands for innovation.

    Network-Centric Defence Operations

    The EMS / Network Management Software (NMS) portfolio helps defence agencies meet the needs of network-centric operations by delivering real-time IT management and common operational views to improve and monitor the availability of critical services. From wireless to terrestrial networks, these products deliver real-time monitoring and fault diagnostics to help deliver reliable situational awareness and command and control. The various application suites provide a single point-of-control for managing all information technology, helping to quickly identify and resolve IT problems before they impact mission critical communication and access to information.

    In general the solutions is geared to offer :

     

    • Real-time situational awareness and global view of  networked systems, applications and services
    • Assurance of war fighter’s ability to access information
    • Network Common Operational Picture (NETCOP) to improve mission effectiveness
    • Comprehensive visibility of global missions and operational units
    • At-a-glance status views of combat systems and supporting systems (viz C4ISR) and applications
    • Real-time visibility and status across the C4ISR infrastructure
      NMS solution rapidly overlay onto existing C4ISR systems
    • Meets the commander’s need for real-time situational awareness from a total force perspective

    The EMS / NMS need to provide :

     

    • Centralised management of networks, systems and applications with real-time monitoring, alarm reduction and problem isolation
    • Visibility of critical IT services facilitated through a network-based common operational picture
    • Faster problem notification and resolution, significantly reducing the Mean-Mime-to-Resolution (MTTR) of problems
    • Proactive identification of mission-impacting outages with advanced escalation and automation of first-line troubleshooting.
    • Mission assurance by testing connectivity and latency between military and network access points
    • Testing the availability and responsiveness of applications to ensure the timely access to information

    Realtime Active Dashboards
    Active Dashboards helps business (government / defence) and operations staff to understand the complex relationships between services and supporting technology. It gives organisations advanced, real-time visualisation of services and processes in a comprehensive service dependency model. Active Dashboards incorporates data from a broad array of IT resources and business support systems that contribute to defining a service. Examples include applications, systems and network devices, and business-related assets such as transactions, revenue and incident records. This information is populated into a real-time, federated service model for automated service impact analysis, root-cause analysis and service level tracking.

    Active Dashboards also provide complete visibility into business services and processes. It can be used to:

    • Understand the cross-domain dependencies as they exist – in real time.
    • Strategically align business and operational requirements.
    • Dynamically track operational, business and customer SLAs and KPIs.
    • Automatically assess the impact of availability, performance, security and business events on service health.

    Implement service quality improvements and mitigate business risk
    IBM Tivoli Netcool
    The IBM Tivoli Netcool portfolio provides real-time management and visibility of complex enterprise environments from high level service views to the underlying infrastructure dependencies. By combining highly scalable event consolidation, and correlation with business impact analysis, the Netcool suite helps organisations proactively manage critical applications and services and control operations costs. The Tivoli Netcool portfolio offers real-time dashboards with integrated business and IT metrics to enable organisations to achieve predictive service management and true strategic business planning.

    • Assure service availability: Proactively detect developing problem with business applications, service and processes before they impact customers and revenue and help assure business continuity.
    • Reduce operational expenses: Enable successful standards adoption including: ITIL, COBIT, and Six Sigma. Improve IT staff efficiency, and reduce mean-time-to-repair through automated analysis and response.
    • Improve Return-on-Investment:Maximise the return on your existing IT assets through the broadest domain management, out-of-the-box third party tool integrations and comprehensive, end-to-end service visibility.Network Management- Tivoli Netcool solutions for network management provide discovery, inventory, diagnosis, and advanced correlation capabilities for layer 1, 2, and 3 networks, helping organisations maximise network uptime. Netcool solutions combine: real-time monitoring, root-cause analysis, and diagnosis, to help organisations achieve higher service availability and to gain the network intelligence required to reduce capital and operational expenditures.

      Application and Systems Managements- IBM Tivoli also provides end to end monitoring of host systems and applications running on those systems. From Windows to UNIX and mainframe systems, you can manage changing conditions about system configuration, status, and performance, as well as applications and file systems – automatically notifying you when problems are detected. Gain complete monitoring of critical applications, including SAP R/3, Oracle Applications, and online trading and Web applications. Track detailed performance metrics for applications, including Apache, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft IIS and many more.

      IBM Tivoli Netcool have been used by many leading large enterprises, service providers, government and defence customers worldwide for the integrated offering it offers and out of the box adaptors available to monitor the most complex heterogeneous environment.

    Real-Time Networking of the Indian Armed Forces

    The Indian armed forces are in the process of modernising their organisational as well as operational structures and as a consequence they are undergoing their most extensive transformation from an industrial-based model to a information based network centric operations.

    The communication infrastructure of the Indian army is undergoing a paradigm shift from platform centric to network centric warfare. The older voice predominant network is now being replaced by state-of-art packet switched infrastructure, which can handle voice, video and data simultaneously. This is also called as “Triple Play” in telecom parlance. The future battlefields are likely to be packed with a plethora of electromagnetic emitters, including communication equipment, radars and jammers. Management of the electromagnetic space, to avoid interference among these systems, would thus pose a major challenge. Recent combat experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon has highlighted the requirement of strong and secure communication infrastructure which is survivable for battlefield management.

    The Indian Army, along with the Indian Air force (IAF), will showcase their joint synergy on the battlefield during ‘fire and manoeuvre’ combat exercise, codenamed “Brazen Chariots”, to be conducted at the Pokharan field firing range in western Rajasthan, during March 2008. They will also showcase the two armed force’s progress in their communication infrastructure too. Breaking away from the traditional approach, the Indian Army together with the Indian Air Force is set to project ‘manoeuvre warfare doctrine’ of the Indian Armed Forces.  The Indian armed forces would spend US$ 10 billion over the next ten years on equipping themselves with network-centric capabilities.

    The networking of all the weapons and sensors of the three armed forces would mean whatever one of them could see, can be seen by all, and it would certainly increase the situational awareness of the battlefield for all the arms of the defence services.

    The Indian Navy on its part has taken small but firm steps towards networked operations. The approach itself is two-pronged. First, the plan is to net-enable the existing navy and then planning to work towards a net-centric future navy. According to Navy Chief Admiral Suresh Mehta, networking is the key to maritime operations in the 21st century. He said, “we already have potent weapons and platforms and additional surface, air and sub-surface combatants such as the ‘Vikramaditya’; the IAF MiG29K aircraft, among others are on the way. We require networking them and synergising their individual abilities.”

    The IAF will develop Software-Defined Radios (SDR) for its optical data link project to be used in its network-centric operations. SDR is a radio communication system, which can tune to any frequency band. It can receive any modulation across a large frequency spectrum by means of as little hardware as possible and by processing the signals through software. This will help the IAF to link up with the hardware of the networks created for the other two forces as well. The IAF has also released four Request For Proposals to four multinational companies that include Rafale, Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), Lockheed Martin and ST Engineering.

    Lockheed Martin, in collaboration with WIPRO Technologies, has set up a Centre of Excellence for NCO, the next generation battlefield management environment, called ‘Ambar Jyoti’, where all components of force-equipment, command and control and logistics are integrated into a seamless operation. With all the three services working towards networking their operations the level of jointness between the forces is going to be very high in future. The task of networking is being taken in real earnest. Consequently, the real-time networking of all services will be the major thrust area during the 11th and 12th Plan periods.

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