Router Management - Router Configuration Management Software

To understand router configuration management, which is an element of network configuration management focused on ensuring your router can effectively communicate with and support your network, it’s important to understand the role of network configuration management

Network configuration involves setup and configuration processes across software, hardware, and other supporting components or devices. Network configuration management is the continuous process of overseeing the setup and maintenance of all these components. It involves discovering devices, monitoring the status and configuration of devices, and maintaining the inventory.

Key elements of network configuration are:

• Software configuration
• Host configuration
• Router configuration

Router configuration and router management is essential for making sure your network is complete. Without it, your router can’t communicate with your other network components.

The basic steps of router configuration are:

• Enabling the router’s firewall and ensuring it’s secure
• Setting a Service Set Identifier, or SSID, for your wireless network, so it’s easier for users to locate it
• Setting the encryption for the network, which is known as the Wired Equivalent Privacy or WEP

For more experienced admins, router configuration can involve configuring the base stations, engaging in Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and more.

Router configuration management, like network configuration management, is the ongoing process of overseeing and maintaining the configuration of routers. This includes making changes to configurations as needed and ensuring those changes are uniform across devices.

A central goal of router configuration management is to improve network reliability and performance and reduce security concerns.

Unfortunately, faulty configuration changes are a common reason for network outages. With every change to router configuration, there comes the risk of causing a network outage, performance degradation, and even creating security issues. Unplanned and unexpected configuration changes can make the network more vulnerable to these risks. However, effective router management can help mitigate these risks.

With router management, users can constantly monitor network routers and keep track of configuration changes, which can lead to fewer surprises, outages, and security risks. By using router management software, configuration changes can also be made on a wide scale across devices to help reduce the chances of human error causing a network risk.

In addition to reducing security risks, router configuration management can help you improve your cybersecurity by allowing you to:

• Enhance the security of your password by changing it from the default to something more unique, which can make it harder for cyberattackers to access your router settings.

• Configure your router settings to tweak or disguise your IP address.
•  Change your router settings to enable multi-SSID and guest Wi-Fi, so you can have separate access points available for known, trusted devices and for guests. You also won’t need to share your Wi-Fi password with anyone who doesn’t need it.
• If you want even more security, router configuration management can let you set “parental controls” to let you control what websites employees can access with the help of web filtering.

Router settings are a very valuable and versatile resource with have a range of benefits for your organization, including boosting security, speeding up your connection, and helping you prevent and address potential vulnerabilities. However, managing router configurations manually can be challenging for a network of any size. Making sure router configurations are correct and optimized is an ongoing and time-consuming endeavor and can become overwhelming when you’re handling other network hardware. If you overlook router configuration management for too long, you may be putting your network security at significant risk.

Professional router configuration software is designed to help an organization looking to take control of its router configurations. An automated router management tool can track and manage router configurations by allowing you to implement routine, wide-scale changes using device-neutral configuration templates where you can easily define the changes you want to make. The best router configuration software can also create device-specific change commands using directives in those configuration templates.

Using a router configuration tool can help you stay on top of router configuration changes and better ensure no unauthorized changes occur. Router management software can also make it easier to make wide-scale, routine changes critical to router configuration management. With router configuration software, you have the support you need to reduce the time spent on necessary (but repetitive) tasks, better coordinate configuration changes throughout the network, and improve network security and performance.

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is built to make router management easier by offering the ability to automatically track and manage device configurations.

NCM is an enterprise-grade router configuration tool designed to let you implement both routine and wide-scale configuration changes using device-neutral configuration templates to define and implement the changes you want to make, including routine config changes across target devices without regard for vendor or command syntax. Once you put directives into the device template, the NCM router management tool uses the information to create device-specific suites of change commands. NCM also lets you review these commands and create a schedule for deploying them.

NCM can help you minimize config errors and improve network reliability by providing the ability to use change controls to approve and deploy defined config changes. NCM also helps you reduce the potential for human error by allowing you to restrict device access using role and access permissions, so you can more easily prevent unauthorized changes.

Network Configuration Manager is also built to automate many traditionally manual tasks to help save you time and effort, such as automatically identifying IOS devices with potential vulnerabilities using the NIST CVE repository service and providing the tools you need to manage the investigation, remediation, or waiver of each vulnerability.

When you use NCM as your router management software, you can expect accurate implementation of router configurations with less manual effort and less room for error.

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager isn’t just a powerful router management tool. It also comes with an array of other features and abilities to help make it stand out from other router configuration management solutions.

Some general features included in NCM are:

• Comprehensive visibility: The intuitive, in-depth dashboard offers a robust view of the network infrastructure, making it easy to identify where configuration errors occur.
• Network compliance: Out-of-the-box compliance assessments and reports are built to make demonstrating compliance with industry standards easier.
• Centralized delegation: Get help controlling who can view device details and make configuration changes.
• IOS vulnerability detection: More easily identify known vulnerabilities entering the system thanks to an integration with the National Vulnerability Database.

NCM also offers more specific features designed to enhance its network configuration abilities, including:

• Network device management: Get automated configuration backup and real-time change detection and notification.
• Automated switch configuration management: Identify switch configuration errors to reduce outages and security vulnerabilities.
• Automated network device configuration: Get centralized control for monitoring and managing configuration changes across devices and device types. Automatically store full device configs that can be copied or restored to replace a failed device or to set up a new device.
• Network audits for network compliance: Monitor devices and perform audits all from one view while automating policy violation audits and inventory reporting.