10G Ethernet: Paving the way to FCoE

If you peer inside the data center of a large healthcare organization, you’re bound to see at least three separate fabrics being supported: Ethernet for the LAN, Fibre Channel for the storage area network, and the specialized Infiniband for high-performance computing (HPC). Keeping with our discussion on the characteristics of the next-generation data center, managing three separate fabrics is hardly the path to simplification.

However, it’s understandable why you’re holding onto this type of architecture – to unify, you’d need an underlying network technology that could handle the unique demands of all three environments. Gigabit Ethernet alone is often not robust enough to deal with the I/O requirements of HPC and large-scale SANs. Fibre Channel and Infiniband are expensive technologies that need highly trained staff. In a time of tight budgets, the double whammy of costly hardware and training is not a recipe for success.

Over the next few years, you’ll see the adoption of a unified network fabric based on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as it evolves and becomes more commonplace in network gear. FCoE enables large data centers dealing with tremendous traffic and storage loads to preserve the benefits of Fibre Channel, which has a strong installed base, while taking advantage of the ubiquity of Ethernet deployments and common skill sets.

Although work on the FCoE standard was finalized last year, there are still significant components that need to be completed to ensure the reliability that users have with traditional Fibre Channel. For instance, there are protocols in the works still to deal with congestion notification, enhanced transmission selection and priority-based flow control. All of these are working their way through the IEEE’s standards process.

As you wait for these piece parts to be settled out, it’s important that you start to look at the most critical element of FCoE’s success – 10G Ethernet. For FCoE to be able to handle the load as gracefully as its counterparts, it needs the workhorse that is 10G switching. Think about the I/O you’ll need to handle electronic medical record requests, backup and storage. Or how much power you’ll need to deal with real-time diagnosing using medical images and other hefty files.

The migration to 10G Ethernet in the near term offers you many benefits beyond the future support of FCoE. Since 10G delivers 10 times the bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet, healthcare organizations can reduce the Gigabit Ethernet NICs they need in highly virtualized environments. Rather than use as many as four to eight Gigabit Ethernet NICs in each server, you can deploy just two 10G Ethernet NICs and achieve full redundancy and availability while increasing bandwidth per virtual machine.

Consolidating around 10G, Gigabit Ethernet network I/O also dramatically reduces the number of Gigabit Ethernet ports, upstream switch ports and cables you need to deploy and manage. And it puts you in line with the goal we’ve outlined over the past few blogs – a flatter network architecture. As a bonus, fewer ports and switches lead to reduced power and cooling.  Both of these outcomes are the essence of the next-generation data center.

Managing the Next-Generation Data Center

By John Gray

In the last blog entry, we talked about the importance of flattening out your healthcare organization’s data center architecture from a three-tier to a two-tier model. But that is just one step in simplifying your data center – the other is to deploy a centralized management methodology.

Centralized management is a critical component of the next-generation data center because it will reduce the complexity of managing this collapsed network you’ve created.

In a recent conversation with Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president at the Yankee Group consultancy in Boston, he stated that “hospitals are going through a tough time right now. They are trying to improve patient care through innovation, but are finding it to be difficult because the ecosystem of doctors, patients, medical suppliers and insurance companies are all on separate networks.”

Moving away from managing your switches, routers and other network devices individually is essential to boosting the efficiency of your data center. It’s also necessary to cost effectively meet the twin demands of compliance and security.

It’s important that as you look for a centralized management tool, you make sure that it can interoperate with the myriad network and security devices in your data center. Otherwise, you’ll heighten the level of complexity instead of lowering it.

With this tool, you should be able to create a policy and automatically deploy it to the entire enterprise. It should also allow you to update and add policies with ease.

A state-of-the-art centralized management tool will offer a single pane of glass so that you can monitor and manage your network in one window and not have to call up multiple management programs. It will also offer updates on the “health” of your network, determining if patches are up to date, software versions are correct, and security software such as anti-virus is in effect.

Centralized management is important not just for your enterprise today, but as you move forward. Consider Fraser Health in Vancouver, British Columbia. This healthcare organization has a dozen acute care hospitals and more than a hundred other medical offices. It has gone through several mergers in the past decade and has worked hard to unify many aspects of IT under a single umbrella.

The IT team attempted to manage the converged networks manually, but soon found it too overwhelming. “When you do things manually, there is a lack of consistency and reliability gets sacrificed,” says manager of network services Mike Lindsay.

Instead, he is deploying a centralized management tool to ensure standardization across all the organization’s sites and to develop and maintain a consistent image among all hardware and software. In addition to the security and stability this move will have on the data center, it will also positively impact costs. Lindsay says centralization and automation will allow Fraser to redirect IT resources that would have been tied up with manual configurations and oversight to be used on more strategic projects.

This type of innovation is helping Fraser and other healthcare organizations stay competitive with a next-generation data center.

Consolidation Does Not Always Equal Simplification

By John Gray

IT executives know that data center consolidation in healthcare doesn’t always lead to simplification. Instead, in many cases, when you reduce locations, you’re left with a highly complex mess at the both the application and network layers.  The successful data center can respond to business requirements without jeopardizing operational and capital costs. Yet, if you’re trying to manage an out-of-control architecture – even if it’s in fewer locations – that goal is unattainable.

What makes the situation more difficult is the thought of adding even more systems to this de-centralized mess. Think about it. Most healthcare organizations operate a three-tier data center architecture that requires them to manage multiple layers of network switching, WAN routers and other infrastructure such as security as individual network elements. As they add new clinical applications – and their affiliated infrastructure – to the mix, there is essentially more gear to turn the knobs on as each system comes with its own operating system and management paradigm. This is hardly a model for simplification.

Imagine if you flatten your data center design, while simplifying its management and increasing performance. Well, it’s possible if you use purpose-built gear that is interoperable and lets you manage the data center as a whole entity – not a mishmash of legacy parts. With this sophisticated, state-of-the-art infrastructure, including switches, routers and security, you can gain IT resiliency and optimal performance.

Take for instance, virtual switches. As IDC reports in an executive brief titled “Simplification Driving Datacenter Network Requirements,” virtual switches “will reduce demand for physical switches but place greater need for performance and reliability at the core.”

In addition, IDC contends that enterprises will not migrate their mission-critical workloads to a virtual architecture unless they have the same consistent network security, management, and policies available on virtual ports as they do on physical ports.

Nowhere is this more critical than in healthcare. As hospitals, physician offices and other members of the medical community make the shift to electronic medical records, they cannot afford to deal with complex management at the network layer that, if mishandled, could lead to outages.

So, even if a virtual switching infrastructure seems promising in terms of allowing you to reduce your overall physical devices, unless you can manage the virtual and physical networks as a logical whole, this endeavor will not hold water.

You need a comprehensive solution that supports a resilient virtual switching fabric. In fact, Yankee Group senior analyst Phil Hochmuth says, “the idea of a fabric – being able to have that failover, that ability to connect quickly and mesh with other nodes in the network – is essential.”

Jeff Kabel, a technical marketing engineer at 3Com, says the key is to be able to take multiple core, distribution and access layer switches and make them look like a single, logical switch. There should be no need for multiple links for redundancy and legacy resiliency protocols. Rather, you have complete physical layer redundancy.

The network control protocols also operate as a cohesive whole to streamline processing, improve performance and simplify network operations. For example, routing protocols calculate routes based on the single logical domain rather than the multiple switches it represents.

In the next blog, we’ll discuss the management system that can further simplify your data center.

Building Your Next-Generation Data Center

Over the next few weeks, John Gray, 3Com’s Data Center Marketing Portfolio Manager, will be our guest blogger. John is focused on H3C enterprise brand products and in particular, on data center solutions and technology. Because the data center is such a hot topic in healthcare, he has kindly agreed to author a series on building next-generation data centers.

By John Gray

It’s no secret that over the next few years, your data center is going to be expected to handle a lot of new applications without missing a beat in supporting your current lineup. You’re going to have to architect an infrastructure that can handle electronic medical records (EMR), Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and telemedicine alongside other life-saving clinical systems.

The aim of your organization in bringing these apps onboard or improving them is to boost patient care as well as revenue. Therefore, blips in operations because your infrastructure can’t handle these new technologies would not be well tolerated.

These blips generally come about because the network is incapable of handling the additional traffic. After all, the applications we mentioned above – EMR, PACS and telemedicine – all can do a number on bandwidth and overall infrastructure capacity. Solving the saturation problems that stem from these applications can lead to a tremendously complex data center.

In a discussion with Phil Hochmuth, a senior analyst with Yankee Group Research in Boston, he describes this troublesome phenomenon in more detail. “When a healthcare organization has a new application, IT typically adds a new server cluster to the network. When the network gets congested or performance falls below par, IT adds more bandwidth,” he says. He calls it an add-and-upgrade cycle that is detrimental to the health of the data center. Hochmuth concludes, “It’s too costly and doesn’t solve the underlying issues.”

We’ve come to realize that the underlying problem lies in the traditional three-tier data center model of access, aggregation and core switching. Each tier has myriad protocols, technologies and management – a true nightmare if what you seek is simplification and resiliency. In fact, a major IT research firm found that two-thirds of a healthcare IT organization’s time, money and effort is spent keeping systems running, the infrastructure operational and the disaster recovery plans functional. Those types of distractions will certainly lead to the failure of health care data centers as you try to take on more innovative projects.

To avoid this game-ending outcome, you must rethink the way you approach the data center. Rather than relying on out-of-date, non-interoperable infrastructure, it’s time to consider the new era of purpose-built technology that addresses the needs of emerging applications. Such state-of-the-art, sophisticated management tools and infrastructure will help you not only adopt new applications, but also improve the performance of your existing systems. In other words, you’ll be the proud leader of a successful next-generation data center.

Over the next few blogs, we’ll discuss in detail some strategies for building the next-generation data center, including data center simplification, server I/O consolidation, the migration from Gigabit Ethernet to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the energy efficient mindset, and last but certainly not least, security and business continuity. We’ll show you why these five areas are the blocks on which you can lay the foundation for your next-generation data center.

Networking skills are hot, hot, hot for 2010

By TerryAnn Fitzgerald

So here we are in 2010 and you’re taking an inventory of your upcoming projects and the needed skill sets. While you may think that networking skills will take a backseat as cloud computing picks up steam, think again.

The challenges that cloud computing presents regarding privacy and compliance – a topic we’ll tackle in a future blog – make it a nonstarter for some healthcare systems. These organizations, that are hoping to cut costs and reduce their data center footprint, will instead have to look internally for solutions such as network consolidation.

In light of this, it’s not surprising that 70 percent of CIOs surveyed by Robert Half Technology last year consider networking skills to be the technical skills in highest demand. In fact, networking beat out desktop support and Windows administration as sought-after skills. Yet, 19 percent report that networking skills are the most challenging to find.

One of the difficulties is finding IT professionals skilled in network virtualization, an emerging trend that aids consolidation and could save healthcare organizations a lot of money. Phillipe Michelet, senior product manager here at 3Com, points out that network virtualization gives enterprises the ability to use the same physical device and logically split it into multiple sub-entities.

Rather than having to build separate physical network infrastructures each time healthcare organizations merge or acquire other organizations, you can instead leverage the physical devices you already have in place.

However, this requires your network team to have virtualization skills so they can efficiently develop, deploy and manage virtual infrastructure. They need to understand and be able to put into practice concepts such as virtual routing forwarder, which isolates different groups of users into separate routing tables. This enables companies to take advantage of network virtualization without jeopardizing security and compliance.

This leads into the next skill set, which arises from the blurring of lines between networking and security. With consolidation, healthcare organizations need IT professionals that consider security and compliance an integral part of their network plans. For instance, you must architect your entire enterprise to account for the privacy of patient data. It’s no longer acceptable to let the security team deal with protection issues as an afterthought. Instead, user authentication and authorization, network access and other security methods must be addressed from the outset of any deployment.

Also, network professionals must choose management tools that integrate network alerts and security alerts so IT has an end-to-end view of potential problems. These management tools must also take into account the nuances of virtual networks and ensure that policies that are applied to physical networks extend to the virtual enterprise. Having a unified view of the network and security aspects of the enterprise makes mitigation and reporting much simpler.

Interestingly, 13 percent of the CIOs interviewed for the Robert Half Technology survey admitted that security is another challenging area for them to find talented personnel.

One way to address this dearth in talent is to cross-train the IT professionals you already have on staff. After all, 43 percent of the CIOs said retaining existing workers will be their number-one staffing priority in 2010. To keep great talent onboard, you have to constantly challenge them and most employees crave new skills.

“Technology teams, in particular, are experiencing rising workloads as businesses move forward with projects previously put on hold,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “Employers need to focus on preventing burnout and keeping their best people engaged at work. This may be a challenge, given that staffing cuts and the reduction or elimination of benefits have left many employees feeling overworked and undervalued.”  Willmer’s 10 tips for retaining top performers can be found here.

Since healthcare organizations are generally under more stringent budget constraints, it only makes sense that you harness the power of training.  Rather than spending precious dollars trying to seek out hard-to-get talent, you’d be well-served to take those dollars and train your network and security staff on virtualization and other cost-saving technologies.

Matchmaking: What skill sets should you be seeking?

By TerryAnn Fitzgerald

As I noted in the previous blog, the shackles are predicted to be coming off hiring in 2010. To make sure you choose your new staff wisely, we’ve done a little research for you on what projects, in addition to the obvious electronic health records and clinical systems we’ve already highlighted, will get the most attention and thus will indicate what skills should grab your focus.

To start, let’s look at some results from the Society for Information Management 2009 IT Trend Survey that was recently released. Respondents listed business intelligence, server virtualization and ERP systems among their top application and technology investments for this year. Customer/corporate portals, enterprise application integration and management, and continuity planning/disaster recovery rounded out the top six in this category.

SIM noted in a press release that the newcomers to the list – ERP systems, customer/corporate portals and enterprise application and integration management – reinforce the drive in healthcare and other industries to quickly deliver new services that reduce the cost of doing business.

SIM’s finding are pretty much in line with what Robert Half Technology reported were the top technical skill sets that healthcare CIOs say their IT organizations need. In addition to traditional network administration, Windows administration and desktop support, healthcare CIOs want job candidates with experience in virtualization (41%), business intelligence/reporting services (39%) and ERP implementation (31%).

Think it’s going to be easy to round up prospective employees with these talents? Think again.

The U.S. government says there will be a shortage of about 51,000 qualified health IT professionals in the next five years – this as the feds are pumping $20 billion into the healthcare arena through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. They hope that money will create between 50,000 and 100,000 jobs between now and 2015, according to InformationWeek.

To find the talent you need, pay attention to some of the new healthcare informatics programs popping up at universities around the country, including Northeastern University.  They’ll have candidates with the blend of IT and clinical systems skills to lead and reap the rewards from these newly funded projects.

In early January, we’ll take a look at the specific network trends and challenges you’ll be facing in 2010 and the skill sets required to meet them head on.

Budgets and staffing in 2010

By TerryAnn Fitzgerald

Could there be light at the end of this budget- and staffing-constrained tunnel you’ve been traveling through the past few years? It seems so.

In an October press release, Gartner stated, “The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2 percent.” The research firm goes on to say that it expects the rebound to total $3.3 trillion in 2010, an increase of 3.3 percent over 2009.

Nowhere is this more evident than in healthcare. A recent article in InformationWeek stated that, according to a recent Robert Half Technology survey, 55% of healthcare CIOs expect their organizations to invest in IT projects during the first quarter. With this money being channeled into IT, it only stands to reason that hiring would also increase so that IT, which has been stretched thin on human resources, would get a boost in staffing as well.

In fact, the article says the Robert Half Technology survey of 1,400 CIOs found that those in the healthcare industry were four times more likely to say they’ll add IT staff than the national sample across all industries. More specifically, the research firm found that 16% of healthcare CIOs are planning to increase hiring in the first quarter of 2010. The driver, according to InformationWeek, is “the push by healthcare providers nationwide to implement new electronic health records and other clinical systems in time to reap federal stimulus rewards that start in 2011.”

Gartner points to three key trends for IT execs to observe as they enter 2010: a shift from capital to operational expenditures in the IT budget; the impact of increased age of IT hardware; and the need for IT to build compelling business cases. Projects that would attract some of the money from the stimulus bill would most likely count as “a compelling business case.”

Over at TheInfoPro consultancy, analysts agree that spending will increase. They believe that the spending will be directed toward increasing existing infrastructure needs. For instance, IT will work to optimize existing server networking and storage assets. Any new projects that do squeak through intense budget scrutiny will have to prove out ROI pretty quickly and be easily deployed, TheInfoPro claims.

Because every project will be scrutinized, you’ll need a staff that can understand the organization’s goals, clearly communicate them between departments and IT, and support a feedback loop to ensure that those goals have been achieved. In other words, gone are the days where most of your staff was locked away in a server room watching if the green lights turned to red.

If you do not plan to increase your staffing budget, then set aside money to train your team on the soft skills surrounding collaboration. That way, when it comes time, your entire team will have the business and technology skills to help you accomplish Gartner’s third focus area – developing compelling business cases.

Click these links for more on the Gartner and TheInfoPro predictions.

Are you seeing the same budgeting and hiring trends in your organization?  If yes, how are you prioritizing your projects?

The Transformed CIO

By TerryAnn Fitzgerald

While 2009 was certainly a challenging year for healthcare CIOs, 2010 is shaping up to be just as daunting. The economy is expected to still be plaguing budgets and staffing yet you’ll have a slew of new projects headed your way such as electronic health records and server virtualization.

Experts are saying that it will take transformational CIOs, rather than functional ones, to help their organizations achieve their business goals. The difference is that you’ll have to adapt to being a strategic part of the C-suite rather than a reactive service provider.

According to CIO Magazine’s “State of the CIO 2009” report, 70% of CIO respondents say that IT is considered an integral business partner by the rest of the business. In their leadership role, CIOs say they spend their time aligning IT with the business goals, cultivating the IT/business partnership, improving IT operations and system performance, and leading change efforts. This is in stark contrast to previous eras when CIOs were knee-deep in hardware and software deployments. These days CIOs say long-term strategic thinking and planning, expertise in running the IT function, and collaboration and influence are the leadership competencies most critical for their current role.

This switch from hands-on IT infrastructure management has resulted in 74% of respondents being able to say they hold a seat on their organization’s executive committee – a higher number than the past two years.

But along with this esteemed posture comes responsibility. At a 2008 industry event, William “Buddy” Gillespie said that the role of the healthcare CIO is shifting from IT manager to visionary. As such, the CIO must now view technology as a means rather than an end and provide transparency into each IT project’s status and value. This requires the CIO to use a common business language to communicate the value in clear, transparent terms. Gillespie outlined three key objectives for a transformational CIO: to deliver core services, build a flexible business platform and deliver business value.

In healthcare, he says there are seven drivers of this change: patient safety and quality of care; transparency in reporting; regulatory and legislative mandates; cost and reimbursement; patient service and satisfaction; interoperability across the delivery of care; and disaster recovery.

These are all visible areas that left unaddressed would put the organization at risk. Therefore, as a 2009 Gartner report “Meeting the Challenge: The 2009 CIO Agenda” points out, CIOs must be above all else decisive and resourceful despite economic conditions. Gartner encourages CIOs to focus on improving business processes, using business intelligence to raise visibility, and enhance workforce effectiveness.

The research firm says CIOs must restructure IT to be more productive and more agile because “the business will not reduce its demand for IT just because you have fewer resources.” They also advise modernizing your technical infrastructure to take advantage of newer technologies that lower cost, use less energy, deliver better performance and provide greater capacity.

The CIO that does all this will shine a positive light on IT and ensure that you maintain your newfound stature within the organization.

Are the expectations for the role of the CIO changing in your healthcare organization?  What are some of the key changes in the last 12 – 24 months?

The Promise of Telemedicine

By TerryAnn Fitzgerald

I’ve noticed a recent rash of newspaper and magazine articles that tout the promises and potential of telemedicine.  The articles focus on patient benefits, particularly as populations around the globe age and chronic conditions increase.  They cite the advantages of in-home monitoring that allows patients to maintain their independence or minimize hospital stays.    The articles also refer to the opportunity to work with healthcare specialists around the globe or to access to medical resources from rural locations.

For healthcare organizations, telemedicine holds the promise of providing a better quality of patient care, allowing clinicians to monitor and intervene before issues become critical.  Other advantages include reductions in medical costs, freeing staff for more urgent patient care and providing a new source of revenue or unique service in an increasingly competitive global healthcare market.

But what are the challenges that healthcare organizations must address to reap the benefits of widespread adoption of telemedicine?  Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for Telemedicine 2009″  mentions several, including reimbursements, legal liability, new models of staffing and care coordination, EMR and CPR integration and lack of sufficient bandwidth or Internet connectivity in some areas.  Despite the issues, the same report states “there is a clear business need.”

HIMSS provides a nice summary of both the benefits and inhibitors in a Vantage Point report on Telemedicine.

While most telemedicine applications are still struggling for mainstream adoption, the demand will increase as restrictions ease and awareness grows. Research from Datamonitor, “2009 Trends to Watch: Healthcare Technology,” shows that 27% of the healthcare organizations surveyed consider telehealth a priority in the next six months.

It seems that now is the best time to start planning for telemedicine initiatives – while you are planning for and addressing the increased demands on your network infrastructure from other healthcare technologies such as EMRs.   By doing so, your healthcare IT organization will be positioned to deliver organizational agility, adaptability and superior value.

By its very nature, telemedicine often requires very large files to travel over long distances from remote locations to a healthcare facility, so there are several key items you’ll want to consider.

Image clarity:  Accurate diagnostics in telemedicine is dependent on image quality.   Tools that provide end-to-end network visibility and network traffic prioritization are an absolute must to assure the required quality of service and low-latency.   Delivery of digital images, voice and video between locations can be accelerated by network services such as MPLS, WAN optimization and application acceleration.

Patient privacy:  Telemedicine adds a layer of complexity to the challenge of securing data and maintaining patient privacy and regulatory compliance that can be addressed most effectively by a multi-layer strategy. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, visit 3Com’s blog on Secure Network Fabric.

Flexible IT foundation:  The Boy Scouts said it best – be prepared.  With the constant state of change in the healthcare environment, plan for a network infrastructure that can easily scale to rapidly adapt to support new initiatives.  Consider a network infrastructure that allows you to embed network services such as security, Voice over IP, WAN optimization and application acceleration, saving both time and money.

Is your healthcare organization actively pursuing telemedicine initiatives?  Are there other issues you’ve had to address for successful deployment?

If you have already implemented a telemedicine solution, what was your biggest challenge?

Wireless healthcare devices a challenge for compliance

By TerryAnn Fitzgerald

It’s an exciting time in healthcare IT. More and more life-saving devices are becoming automated and wireless. For instance, blood pressure and heart monitors track patient vital signs around-the-clock, freeing nurses to perform other critical functions.

A recent report from ABI Research titled, “The Current State of Global Healthcare Wi-Fi,” states, “One of the quiet revolutions taking place in healthcare is the Wi-Fi enabling of so many different medical devices.”  The report goes on to state that one vendor, Zoll Medical, estimates that “nursing staffs can save seventy hours a year by having equipment report on its own condition and indicate when it needs repair” with the use of its Wi-Fi enabled defibrillators.

However, as time-saving as these devices are, they also pose security and compliance risks for hospital networks and patient privacy as anyone caught in the Conficker malware knows all too well. These devices automatically feed sensitive data into records and therefore must comply with HIPAA and other protective mandates. They must also follow network guidelines in terms of having up-to-date patches and virus scans, as well as approved configurations.

So what can you do to minimize the risk and ensure that all requirements for patient privacy and network security are being met?

IT has to manage these devices as part of their centralized network security plan. IT should develop device-specific policies that set configuration and patch standards. They can then use VPN firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and other network security tools to enforce the policies. These tools would keep tabs on the devices to ensure compliance and scan them for potential threats. If the policy management software detects configuration errors, lapsed patching or malware, it can alert IT and quarantine a device until it is brought back in line with policy specifications.

These tools also can monitor and log any changes made to the device, such as operating system or application updates or unauthorized access. This data can be used to generate reports for internal or external compliance audits and to detect and resolve threat patterns. IT teams can set thresholds that alert them to possible threats to the devices so that problems can be mitigated in real time.

Centralized policy management and enforcement tools are essential for healthcare organizations to realize the full potential of wireless devices without worrying about disclosing sensitive patient data or jeopardizing the hospital network.

Has your organization taken a proactive look at your medical devices?  Are they a part of your centralized network security plan?