3 Critical Questions to Ask When Assessing Your Remote Site Visibility Strategy

Remote sites come in many formats—from research clinics to warehouses to branch banks and more. These sites are critical to organizations; whether they help create life-saving drugs, transport essential goods, or enable important financial transactions, they keep businesses up and running from across the globe. Although these sites all carry out very different functions for their respective industries, the need for reliable communication is something they share in common.

As vital resources to the business, remote employees must be able to communicate continuously and effectively with their extended teams—no matter where they are located—to efficiently carry out daily operations and stay productive. For this reason, unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) technology has become paramount to maintaining business continuity at remote sites. Furthermore, customer interactions with remote site employees must be seamless to preserve user experience quality and uphold customer satisfaction standards. Lagging video feeds and dropped UCaaS calls are major obstacles that negatively impact customers.

UCaaS Performance Challenges Affect Remote Site Operations

Interrupted communications stemming from poor UCaaS performance can have detrimental downstream impacts on the business. Missing production quotas, delays in patient care, and regulatory compliance fines are just a few examples of repercussions that can negatively impact the bottom line and the organization’s overall reputation. Without open and high-functioning communication channels, it is inevitable that business will suffer. For customers, poor user experiences and interactions with the business can affect customer retention and cause brand and reputation damage to the organization.

NETSCOUT recently released a report detailing research from a survey conducted to analyze IT team challenges when supporting UCaaS and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies, which are used by most organizations to communicate between employees or employees and customers. One of the key findings this research revealed was that the more remote sites an organization has, the more UCaaS tools that the organization supports. This means that without a vendor-agnostic performance management tool, IT teams are tasked with assessing their myriad of UCaaS platforms to comb through and communicate with support teams to pinpoint the source of slowdowns and degradation. Without an independent, packet-based monitoring tool, identifying the true root cause of disruptions is significantly more challenging, and obtaining evidence to determine accountability is unnecessarily difficult.

3 Critical Remote Site Visibility Questions

Regardless of the UCaaS technologies being utilized or the types of remote sites, an organization has, here are three critical questions organizations can ask when assessing their remote site visibility strategy:

1. Where is the source of slowdowns across your ecosystem?
   • Being able to quickly determine the true root cause of performance issues throughout the communication ecosystem is essential to combatting them and preventing them in the future. The issue may be at the remote office itself—for example, equipment misconfigurations, unplanned user traffic, or application utilization changes. Or it could be elsewhere—for example with a third party, UCaaS vendor, or bandwidth issue at fault. Regardless of where the problem originated, swift identification leads to swift remediation. Packet-level insights help IT teams determine the precise origin of the issue to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).
2. What costs are associated?
   • According to Gartner, the cost of network downtime is approximately $5,800 per minute. NETSCOUT’s recent research reported that 47 percent of surveyed companies estimated at least $100,000 in lost sales and productivity from recent UCaaS outages. Regardless of what is causing the performance issues, downtime, outages, and efficient troubleshooting have significant associated costs that hinder revenue-generating activities. It is important to understand the cost of downtime at your business’ unique remote offices—such as factories, distribution sites, or hospitals.
3. What ripple effects will poor performance have on the business?
   • Network delays and performance issues with SaaS, UCaaS, and other critical business applications can cause a negative chain of events for organizations, impacting their most critical services, employees, and customers. Service delivery delays cause operational setbacks. Employee efficiency and productivity, customer satisfaction, regulatory and compliance issues, and company and brand reputation are all key areas affected by the consequences of performance issues.

NETSCOUT Remote Site Visibility Solutions Assure Performance and User Experience

Remote site performance monitoring plays a large role in addressing these three questions for IT teams that are managing global operations from dispersed locations and working diligently to keep employees connected and customers happy. Getting ahead of potential performance issues by strategically instrumenting packet-based monitoring in remote sites can give your IT team the visibility needed to reduce blind spots throughout the organization’s infrastructure. With NETSCOUT’s remote InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances, IT teams can combine packet-based monitoring with synthetic user experience testing to ensure customer experience is positive and remote office employees are effectively communicating via the UCaaS technologies and other tools they rely on daily to do their jobs.

Learn more about how NETSCOUT solutions and early warning capabilities helped this organization improve its remote site monitoring strategy to assure performance and user experience quality for employees and customers.