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Over the past few years, technological and business advancements have created increasingly grand expectations. Your customers expect an “always on” experience. (Today, you can also add “always fast,” “always intuitive,” “always successful,” and so on.) Fundamentally, if customers find it too difficult to engage digitally with your business, they’ll engage elsewhere.

Digital transformation: The implications for network operations

Meeting heightened customer expectations is basically what digital transformation is all about. In the race to meet these expectations, speed innovation, and stay competitive, organizations continue to adopt transformational technologies and services, such as cloud offerings, SaaS, SD-WAN, and more.

However, by adopting these approaches, network operations (NetOps) teams have to contend with some fundamentally different requirements and challenges. In the past, organizations like yours had data centers and remote offices, which were all connected via a network your teams owned and managed. Your NetOps teams had full visibility and control; they knew every packet, route, and device on the network.

Today, your NetOps teams are contending with a completely different paradigm. Now, critical services are fundamentally reliant upon networks that the NetOps team doesn’t own, manage, or have visibility into. 

The result is that NetOps teams contend with more complexity, while their ability to meet their charters erodes. According to recent research, 74% of enterprises are planning to deploy 10 or more new network technologies over the next two years. In addition, 81% currently report they have network monitoring blind spots. Another report found that between 2018 and 2022, the percentage of NetOps teams that are successful with their overall missions has declined from  47% to 27%.

Why is NetOps getting so difficult, and how can you beat these odds? Keep reading.

Broadcom

The advantages and NetOps obstacles of transformation

The adoption of SD-WAN, cloud, and SaaS, and the widespread reality of hybrid work have completely changed NetOps. While each innovative approach offers advantages, it also introduces NetOps challenges.

Public cloud

Public cloud services are popular because they offer organizations flexibility, lower costs, and more rapid deployments. But these services present entirely different traffic patterns than those of the past. The reliance upon external, third-party networks presents significant blind spots. This results in lengthy troubleshooting times, increased operations costs, and greater risk of user experience issues.

SD-WAN

Similarly, the adoption of SD-WAN presents both advantages and challenges. These technologies can give the business a more secure and cost-effective highway to the cloud. However, SD-WAN can also leave already-stretched NetOps teams contending with tens of thousands of new events and alarms. Further, SD-WAN vendors don’t offer coverage of cloud networks, your data centers, or the Wi-Fi networks work-from-home users rely upon.

SaaS

Replacing legacy apps with SaaS can provide an array of benefits, including reduced infrastructure and operational costs. However, you also lose visibility and control when your users start relying on apps that are running outside your data center.

Work-from-home models

The move to hybrid and work-from-home models provides many advantages, enabling employees to be productive, no matter where they may be. However, without a way to gain insights into the ISP and local Wi-Fi networks users rely upon, your NetOps teams have no way to spot and preempt potential issues. They’re stuck reacting to problems after the fact, and the business is saddled with diminished productivity.

Conclusion

Don’t let the “gotchas” of digital transformation get you. Make sure your digital transformation plans include a plan for NetOps transformation. It is only by gaining visibility and control of modern, hybrid network ecosystems that you can safeguard service levels and maximize the potential of your transformations.

To learn more about Experience-Driven NetOps, visit Broadcom.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

‘Mind the gap’ is an automated announcement used by London Underground for more than 50 years to warn passengers about the gap between the train and the platform edge.

It’s a message that would resonate well in IT operations. Enterprises increasingly rely on “work from anywhere” (WFA) infrastructure, software as a service (SaaS), and public cloud networks. In this complex platform mix, visibility gaps can quickly surface in the performance of ISP and cloud networks, along with remote work environments.

Gaps are also inherent in today’s IT standard operating procedures. Network teams follow a certain set of rules to begin troubleshooting and ultimately isolate and fix issues. If these standardized workflows are missing core features, or teams need multiple tools to run these troubleshooting procedures, this can quickly result in delayed remediation and potential business disruption.

Dimensional Research, for example, reveals that 97% of network and operations professionals report network challenges and 81% confirm network blind spots. Complete outages (37%) are the worst problem, although network issues have also delayed new projects (36%).

So how can IT operations close the gap? The enterprise needs network monitoring software that reaches beyond the data center infrastructure; providing end-to-end network delivery insights that correspond with users’ digital experience.

It’s time to re-think network monitoring. These are four key capabilities network professionals should consider for a modern network monitoring platform.

User experience: Moving business applications to multi-cloud platforms and co-located data centers makes third-party networks a performance dependency. Digital experience monitoring along the network, between the end-user and the cloud deployments becomes a necessity to ensure seamless user experiences.Scale: Demand for SaaS, unified communications as a service (UcaaS), contact center as a service (CcaaS), and the WFA culture is rapidly expanding the network edge. Network professionals need to harness the complexity and dynamic nature of these deployments.Security: The modern WAN infrastructure involves technologies such as software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), next-generation firewall (NGFW), and much more. Misconfigurations can easily be missed, resulting in performance issues or security breaches.Visibility: The remotely connected workplace introduces a new, uncharted network ecosystem. Visibility into these remote networks such as home WiFi/LAN is at best patchy, making issue resolution a guessing game.

The bottom line? IT teams need a complete, efficient view of their network infrastructure, including all applications, users, and locations. Without it, IT risks losing control of operations, ultimately eroding confidence in IT, and potentially forcing decision-makers to reallocate or reduce IT budgets.

Now is the time to rethink network operations and evolve traditional NetOps into Experience-Driven NetOps. With Experience-Driven NetOps, network teams can proactively identify the root cause of problems and isolate issues within a single tool that enables one-click access to all their standard operating procedures through out-of-the-box workflows and user-experience metrics. This industry-first approach delivers digital experience and network performance insights across the edge infrastructure, internet connections, and cloud services, allowing teams to plan for network support where it matters most.

Maybe it’s time for that “mind the gap” announcement to be broadcast in IT departments? With a possible slight change to, “mind the growing void” to ensure networks are experience-proven and network operations teams are experience-driven.

Tackle the new challenges of network monitoring in this eBook, 4 Imperatives for Monitoring Modern Networks. Read now and discover how organizations can plan their monitoring strategy for the next-generation network technologies.

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