How do you manage IP addresses?

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Typically pushed to the backburner, IP address management (IPAM) upgrades in enterprise IT departments might have gotten some attention last year, according to recent survey results.

BT conducted a Web-based survey on IPAM throughout February 2009, which was completed by 260 IT professionals around the globe and found that fewer organizations are relying on spreadsheets alone for their IPAM needs. According to BT's survey, 34% of respondents are using spreadsheets to assign and monitor IP addresses, down from 46% about a year ago. More than half of those polled use an automated solution, including software and appliances, BT says.

"This year, for the first time, a majority of respondents (52%) use an automated solution to assign and monitor IP addresses," BT's survey reads. "More than one-third (34%) of respondents continue to rely on spreadsheets to assign and monitor their IP addresses. However, this figure is a steep decline from just a year ago, when 46% of respondents relied on this method. Fewer respondents (7%) still use manual procedures."

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Typically pushed to the backburner, IP address management (IPAM) upgrades in enterprise IT departments might have gotten some attention last year, according to recent survey results.

BT conducted a Web-based survey on IPAM throughout February 2009, which was completed by 260 IT professionals around the globe and found that fewer organizations are relying on spreadsheets alone for their IPAM needs. According to BT's survey, 34% of respondents are using spreadsheets to assign and monitor IP addresses, down from 46% about a year ago. More than half of those polled use an automated solution, including software and appliances, BT says.

"This year, for the first time, a majority of respondents (52%) use an automated solution to assign and monitor IP addresses," BT's survey reads. "More than one-third (34%) of respondents continue to rely on spreadsheets to assign and monitor their IP addresses. However, this figure is a steep decline from just a year ago, when 46% of respondents relied on this method. Fewer respondents (7%) still use manual procedures."

Still, the fact that IPAM is not top of mind for many managers continues to be a reason companies don’t deploy automated solutions. The survey showed that 32% of respondents don't use an automated solution or managed service for IPAM because other projects continue to have a higher priority within their IT departments. More than one-fourth of those respondents say their network is too small to justify the expense of an automated solution and about 10% said management resistance keeps them from moving to an automated commercial or in-house method of managing IT addresses.

Yet some improvements have been seen on the best practices front, the survey shows. BT suggested nine best practices to survey respondents and while IT professionals typically only use four of the nine best practices, there is some increase since previous surveys.

'The most commonly performed practice (by 52% of respondents), which is trending upward in usage, is automating inventory control over IP address space in a centralized database," the report reads. "Undoubtedly centralizing this data, particularly as the number of IP addresses increases, makes management considerably easier and provides additional value by reducing human errors as well as improving productivity, reliability and security."

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Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.