Why Pervasive Visibility is Imperative for Modern Enterprise Network Success

CIOs are increasingly being called upon to serve as modern-day digital champions, deftly shaping and enabling digital transformation initiatives across the enterprise while effortlessly navigating the complexity of a rapidly evolving network landscape.

Making matters more challenging, CIOs are hampered by traditional IT practices that weren’t designed for next-generation environments that involve on-premise data centers, as well as private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Adding to the challenge, reliance on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions – intended to avoid upfront costs associated with traditional software purchases and reduce maintenance costs – has served to further complicate the difficult task of ensuring performance and security.

And 90% of companies support more than six SaaS tools and applications, and a vast majority (59%) support between 11to 25 applications. And despite the already large number of SaaS applications and tools in use today for many businesses, 76% of companies reported an increase in the number of these tools and applications over the past year.

The Push to Cloud and Edge Computing Creates Need for Low Latency

Companies are increasingly moving to cloud-based networks and edge computing. The Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report found that cloud adoption continues to become more mainstream with 71% of respondents describing themselves as heavy users, which is up from 65% last year. The report concluded that most organizations are utilizing a multi-cloud strategy, with 89% of respondents indicating such an approach.

As more workloads move to the cloud and out to the edge, and applications are progressively being siloed on different clouds, IT is faced with the challenge of dealing with multiple environments as they strive to ensure the performance of services and applications.

Making matters more difficult, there is a growing reliance on a complex combination of applications hosted in third-party virtualized private data centers, colocation sites, public cloud, and third-party SaaS and unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and unified communication and collaboration as a service (UCaaS) providers. Many of these do not traverse the private data center where visibility exists, resulting in a lack of independent performance metrics, which leaves IT at a decided disadvantage. Loss of ownership and control throughout the multivendor SD-WAN and public cloud environment makes managing networks exponentially more challenging. All of this highlights the importance of rethinking how the network is designed from the ground up in order to create a low latency, highly efficient, and extremely reliable environment. 

The Need for Network Visibility Across Technical Borders

Given the aforementioned complexities, the need for pervasive visibility across the entire network and its many interdependencies is becoming absolutely vital. When IT lacks a deep understanding of what and where issues within the network are happening, it becomes exceedingly difficult to pinpoint problems and take immediate and appropriate action.

In the words of Paradigm Solutions’ Laura Hemenway, “CIOs went through so much so quickly in the past few years that there is no transformation project that’s not full of data unknowns, process gaps, broken interfaces, or expired programs. And unless CIOs take the time to create a solid foundation, this is going to be pulling at them, rolling around in the back of their head.”

For IT to obtain the information needed to sustain the degree of control required means adopting a holistic, end-to-end approach to monitoring that allows teams to pinpoint performance issues or service interruptions, whether they are internal or within a vendor’s environment.

Overcoming Gaps in IT Resources

Network problems and application disruptions present significant hurdles for enterprises that lack sufficient IT staff across highly-distributed facilities, such as development centers, sales and support offices. In addition to staff shortages, most IT teams can’t provide 24/7/365 coverage, leaving gaps when no one is “tending the farm.” Instead of focusing on new technology initiatives that drive the business forward, limited IT personnel must be diverted to performance management support, thereby stretching resources even thinner.

In today’s modern, digitally transformed enterprise, overcoming gaps in IT resources is key to ensuring network performance is optimal and that the end-user experience is flawless. Visibility-as-a-service (VaaS) is an important means of bolstering internal IT resources. When IT teams and VaaS resources collaborate with third-party vendors, utilizing pervasive visibility obtained by proactively monitoring the entire network, cross-domain issues can be quickly and efficiently dealt with. Having concrete details that pinpoint the source of problems eliminates time lost to vendor finger-pointing and unproductive war room sessions. IT is able to effectively lower mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for complex issues, thus reducing the impact on revenue, employee productivity, and costs.

Assuring quality performance and user experience in highly complex environments tests the mettle of even the savviest CIO. When networks and applications fail, business reputation is on the line. Pervasive visibility is essential to achieving the CIO vision for modern enterprise network success.

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