In the coming years, NASA’s James Webb telescope will discover the edge of the observable universe, allowing astronomers to search for the very earliest stars and galaxies, formed more than 13 billion years ago.
That’s quite a contrast to today’s network operations visibility, which can sometimes feel like the lens cap has been left on the telescope. Explosive growth in new technology adoption, growing complexity, and the explosive use of internet and cloud networks has created unprecedented blind spots in how we monitor network delivery.
These visibility gaps obscure knowledge about critical applications and service performance. They can also hide security threats making them more difficult to detect. Ultimately, it can impact customer experience, revenue growth, and brand perception.
A global survey by Dimensional Research finds that 81% of organizations have network blind spots. More than 60% of larger companies state they have 50,000 or more network devices and 73% indicate it is growing increasingly difficult to manage their network. According to the study, removing network blind spots and increased monitoring coverage will improve security, reliability, and performance.
Dimensional Research also reports that current monitoring and operations solutions are ill-equipped for the tasks at hand and unable to support a massive influx of new technology over the next two years, leading to slower adoption and deployment with increased business risk.
Without solutions that deliver expanded visibility into remote locations, un-managed networks, and traffic patterns, IT can become overly dependent on end-users to report service issues after these problems have impacted performance. And no organization wants that to happen.
Performance insights across the edge infrastructure and beyond
The massive adoption of SaaS and Cloud apps has made the job of IT even harder when it comes to understanding the performance of business functions. With no visibility into the internet that delivers these apps to users, IT is forced to resort to status pages and support tickets to determine if an outage does or does not affect users.
Now is the time to rethink network operations and evolve traditional NetOps into Experience-Driven NetOps. You need to extend visibility beyond the edge of the enterprise network to internet monitoring and bring modern capabilities like end-user experience monitoring, active testing of network delivery, and network path tracing into the network operations center. Only by being equipped with such capabilities can organizations ensure networks are experience-proven and network operations teams are experience-driven. As a result, they gain credibility and build confidence in business users while delivering hybrid working and cloud transformations.
Take the real-world example of a major oil and gas services company. Most employees were set to work from home at the outset of the pandemic. The organization needed to scale up the WAN infrastructure from 10,000 to 60,000 users in just a few weeks. The challenge was to see into VPN gateways, ISP links, and Internet router performance to manage this increase in use. By standardizing on a modern network monitoring platform, the company benefited from unified performance and capacity analytics that enabled making the right upgrade decisions to increase the number of remote workers by six-fold.
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.
