Open network management

Much impetus has been given to network management standardization by the formation of the OSI/Network Management Forum, an organisation whose sole focus is on network management. The approach adopted is pragmatic and concentrates at first on linking the many `islands´ of network management created by the lack of standards, in order to allow them, at last, to communicate with each other. This has been done by adopting a simple dumb-bell architecture which can be interpreted, in the first instance, as enabling peer-to-peer communication between network management centres. This architecture is not restricted solely to peer-to-peer communication