Saeed M. Agbariah, George Mason University, USA

As networks continue to grow in size, speed and complexity, as well as in the diversification of their services, they require many ad-hoc configuration changes. Such changes may lead to potential configuration errors, policy violations, inefficiencies, and vulnerable states. The current Network Management landscape is in a dire need for an automated process to prioritize and manage risk, audit configurations against internal policies or external best practices, and provide centralize reporting for monitoring and regulatory purposes in real time. This paper defines a framework for automated configuration process with a policy compliance and change detection system, which performs automatic and intelligent network configuration audits by using pre-defined configuration templates and library of rules that encompass industry standards for various routing and security related guidelines.System administrators and change initiators will have a real time feedback if any of their configuration changes violate any of the policies set for any given device.

Compliance and Real-time Change Detection, Policy Management