Vinay brings in nearly 2 decades of vast professional experience and functional knowledge across Sales and Marketing domains in the IT networking industry to his current role as the Regional Director (Enterprise), India and SAARC at NETSCOUT. He has held several leadership positions in leading IT/ITeS companies during the span of his career. Vinay’s areas of expertise cover, Business Alliances, Managed Services, Enterprise Software, Business Development and Partner Management. For over 4 years, Vinay held this position at NETSCOUT and is responsible for Sales and Business Development functions at the organisation.
More organisations are leveraging digital transformation to re-write business models and create incredible and newer customer experiences that ensure better business outcomes. This means digital businesses have to constantly adapt themselves to the evolving customer demands with a hybrid – cloud infrastructure that provides mixed environments. Based on their merits and challenges, a combination of on-premises computing, private and public clouds are used by organisations for the agility and interoperability it provides for workloads that frequently change due to being dynamic in nature.
More and more businesses are deploying complex hybrid infrastructure for the agility it delivers. However, for successfully managing the complex hybrid cloud technology, which is a critical business solution, several factors including workload inventory, security and governance have to be monitored continuously.
Today’s competitive digital landscape has made the rich user experience, an important criteria to stay ahead of the curve. Be it, customer or employee facing applications, users demand that they deliver peak performance, all the time, irrespective of the type of device used or location from where they are working. With increasing digital transformation, application delivery and complexity have increased too. However, applications and networks are expected to perform well or face the risk of losing customers or impacting employee performance.
Addressing the gaps in legacy Application and Performance monitoring tools
Enterprises certainly require soundly performing applications that spans voice, video and various other business-critical applications in order to deliver seamless performance to their users.
Although digital transformation accelerated during the last year, due to the pandemic outbreak, many businesses are still transforming their legacy infrastructure as well as their application monitoring tools. Without end-to-end visibility into the digital infrastructure and services, detecting systemic faults is a challenge leading to longer downtime and poor customer experience, hampering business operations and revenues. Furthermore, legacy solutions often lack the ability to trend traffic utilization and monitor application performance in today’s hybrid-cloud environments and complex application architectures with exponentially growing users, networks, and applications. Recently, one Fortune 500 company CIO instructed his staff to develop strategies and implement monitoring solutions to reduce the time it took to investigate, troubleshoot, and resolve problems with their applications throughout the multi-cloud environment. The goal was to eliminate War Rooms entirely.
Features available in specific monitoring tools for different categories, such as Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, Application Performance Monitoring, Network Traffic Analysis and Hybrid-Cloud Management Solutions are also present in other tools. Deploying all of them with overlapping features will create operational silos, delays in issue identification and further increase in overall costs accompanied by decrease in efficiency of the process, crippling employee morale. It is critical to deploy solutions that provide end-to-end visibility and analytics for application performance and insights into employee experience.
A single pane of visibility for views and analysis across different cloud environments makes it easier to manage rather than addressing them in silos, separately, consuming more time and resources. It is important to have clear and actionable visibility throughout the IT environment, which is used for establishing business continuity, risk mitigation, employee productivity, innovation, remote work management, and customer satisfaction, all driving the organisation’s business objectives. Any visibility blind spot will abruptly stop the smooth flow of business services and is not beneficial to the organisation. The solution should be able to analyse applications for performance metrics that are associated with responsiveness, errors, conversations and service dependencies. Implementing a comprehensive network and application performance management solution for end-through-end visibility not only helped that IT team for the Fortune 500 company meet the goal of eliminating War Rooms, they reduced the average time to research, troubleshoot, and remediate problems from 15 – 16 hours to 15 – 20 minutes, which was a noticeable improvement for employees and customers alike.
Ongoing 24X7X365 proactive Managed Services – an imperative
Round-the-clock proactive managed services support for performance management solutions should deliver hands-free proactive monitoring, triaging of services and extract critical, actionable insights. These insights should include, application performance issues of business, industry, voice, video and SaaS applications. They should be able to monitor and service complex, multi-vendor network environments, such as private data centres, co-locations, public cloud, remote offices and WAN.
The 24X7X365 service, besides proactive monitoring, should analyse incidents, tune alerts, and triage and trouble-shoot customer issues, and if issues arise, share monthly reports with recommendations for optimising performance in the future to the IT staff. This will ensure high availability of all critical applications, identify and resolve potential issues, eliminate downtime and bottlenecks, thereby costs related to them can be avoided.
A flexible and reliable monitoring service can manage the fast-growing and evolving infrastructure and, should be able to scale to monitor increasing expansion and/or performance monitoring visibility, while remaining secure. Compliance monitoring should be an integral part of the solution as well, to ensure the organisation is complying with statutory, regulatory, and all internal compliances in addition to relevant laws and regulations. This can mitigate risks to a great extent.
With the continuous visibility it provides, it becomes easier to manage the complex, multi-vendor, multi-network environments. This will reduce the burden of the IT team which can then focus on the core business initiatives of the organisation.
Regardless of whether the employee is using MS Office 365 or MS Teams, Web and Cloud Services using HTTP and DNS or accessing data centres over VPN or virtual desktop interfaces, granular visibility should be made possible with the right solution. The monitored data is leveraged for issue resolution, strategic planning and evidence-based decision making.
A managed service platform delivers round-the-clock end-through-end visibility into the entire network and application performance. It provides end-point protection for clients across geographies in addition to identifying and protecting against DDoS and malware attacks besides other security threats.
In the current business environment with complex applications and networks and, sophisticated cyber threats, it is all the more important to choose the right monitoring solution as well as appropriate managed service support with all mentioned functions. It should also be easy to implement and customise, besides be flexible and scalable too for optimising customer experience and employee productivity. The solution in addition to being compliant, should evolve and adapt to the changing application and network landscape and have the flexibility to address future challenges.