If you thought network operations was a daunting challenge in the past few years, wait until you see what’s around the corner.
First, let’s consider the disruptions in the recent past. COVID has led people to increasingly work from anywhere. Digital transformation is accelerating as enterprises rush to remodel their operating models. The cloud, for example, is the “go to” platform for almost everything now – from back-office processes to customer-facing applications, and the secure way to get to the cloud now is SD-WAN.
Where does this leave the network? According to a global survey by Dimensional Research, not in a good place. The survey reveals that networks are experiencing explosive growth with new technology adoption: 49% of companies have 50,000 or more networked devices. Meanwhile, 73% of organizations indicate it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage their network.
Network blind spots are the key issue. Visibility gaps obscure knowledge about critical applications and service performance. They also hide security threats which can impact customer experience, revenue growth, and brand perception. Dimensional Research finds that 81% of organizations have network blind spots.
It’s what’s around the corner that matters too.
According to a new study by EMA, a network management megatrend in 2022 is a shortage of skilled networking personnel. This is contributing to the lack of success with network operations. More than 26% of enterprises, for example, are having “true difficulty” with staffing. IT organizations that struggle with hiring are also less likely to report overall success with network operations.
Why is hiring so difficult? Companies are struggling to find people with specialized networking skills, EMA reports. Leadership prefers lean staff/do more with less and the talent pool is too junior/inexperienced. Among the key skills in short supply are network monitoring, public cloud networking, and network troubleshooting.
Can traditional network management tools manage both the disruptive digital change and the skills shortage? Not really. Dimensional Research reports that current monitoring and operations solutions are ill-equipped to deliver the 360-degree visibility highlighted earlier. They also require a greater degree of manual intervention – exacerbating the skills shortage problem even further.
Removing the technology and skills bottlenecks to success
Help is around the corner though. New approaches such as Experience-Driven NetOps deliver the unified end-to-end network visibility needed to understand and manage the performance of digital services, while providing easily triage workflows that take the complexity out of finding the root cause of modern network performance issues This approach bridges network silos and extends monitoring reach into edge services, multi-cloud, SaaS, and further, allowing the enterprise to see every communication path and degradation point for the entire end-user experience.
According to the EMA study, “Enterprises that integrate network operations into a cross-domain operations center are more successful than those that keep network operations in a standalone NOC. When NetOps lives in a cross-domain operations center, network professionals spend more time on strategic projects.”
Take the case of a global technology company, which has adopted modern network monitoring to lower their total cost of ownership and improve operational visibility. The platform is reducing alarm noise by 70%, reducing manual work, and fostering customer confidence by continually meeting SLAs.
Network operations teams have a people problem and a technology problem. Adopting an Experience-Driven NetOps approach eliminates both challenges, removing the technology and skills bottlenecks to network operations success.
You can learn more about how to tackle the challenges of network visibility in this new eBook, Guide To Visibility Anywhere. Read now and discover how organizations can create network visibility anywhere.
