CIOs have a lot on their plates. Their responsibilities include leading digital transformation efforts at the organization, delivering ROI on technology investments, and providing a secure platform for mission critical business processes.
The last thing a CIO needs is an internet outage that could disrupt ecommerce activities, prevent remote workers from connecting to cloud-based applications, and essentially bring the business to a grinding halt.
And today’s customers, as well as employees, have high expectations and low tolerance levels when it comes to slow Internet (latency), which can be just as damaging as a full-on outage. According to a Forrester Consulting survey commissioned by Catchpoint, 65% of enterprise respondents said that even a minor disruption caused potential customers to halt the ecommerce purchase cycle. Disruptions can also frustrate employees and reduce worker productivity.
These types of disruptions occur more often than you might think. Respondents to the Forrester survey reported an average of 76 internet disruptions a month across all components of the Internet Stack. And they can be costly; 51% of respondents said they lost more than $500,000 in a single month and 12% said they lost more than $1 million.
Why IPM
Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) is an emerging technology that provides full visibility across the entire Internet Stack, enabling organizations to quickly identify and troubleshoot disruptions, no matter the source.
IPM solutions create synthetic traffic that runs across a cloud-based network of independently hosted vantage points deployed at service provider and enterprise nodes. IPM platforms also place agents on employee devices to monitor the end user experience.
With this enhanced level of visibility, IPM platforms help IT teams measure, scope, and respond to an outage or event, resulting in reduced mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). IPM tools can identify potential disruptions before the end user is even aware, enabling IT teams to proactively fix issues before they cause problems.
Respondents to the Forrester survey who deployed IPM reported a range of benefits including increased revenue (75% of respondents), improved customer experience (71%), increased workforce productivity (58%) and improved brand perception (50%).
The Catchpoint difference
Catchpoint’s IPM platform has five solutions that deliver complete operational visibility into all aspects of the business: Customer, Workforce, Network, Application, and Website Experience.
Because Catchpoint is de-coupled from hyperscalers, SaaS platforms and other cloud-based resources, the Catchpoint IPM Platform provides outside-in visibility into the entire Internet Stack.
GigaOm sums up why CIOs should have IPM solutions on their radar screens: “The increasingly intricate digital supply chain and proliferation of as-a-service delivery models means that today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. When services are dependent on third parties, they are highly vulnerable to outages. IPM solutions address this by providing visibility over external networks and services. Today’s question is not if but when an outage will happen. This means IT decision-makers must choose between bearing the full weight of these outages or investing in an IPM solution to navigate them intelligently.”
