The Hidden Challenges of Remote Work: Why IT Teams Need Complete Visibility
Achieving End-to-End Visibility to Safeguard Performance and Efficiency in Remote Work Environments
Remote work is on the rise with 32.6 million American expected to ditch the central office by 2025. But as the workforce shifts, so do the complexities IT teams face.
Today’s ongoing digital transformation has made it possible for employees to conduct work from nearly anywhere around the world. These locations might include branch offices and retail distribution sites, health clinics and manufacturing plants, as well as home offices. Connectivity and collaboration are absolutely essential to remote workers in order to continue business as usual.
To facilitate work from remote sites, there is a growing reliance on multiple tools, such as:
Given all the tools in use by these highly complex distributed work environments, IT teams face significant challenges managing everything, while ensuring optimal network and application performance. When performance fails to meet expectations, IT quickly finds itself in the hot seat!
In the face of this growing network complexity, IT needs end-through-end visibility and remote site observability to effectively monitor performance, uncover problems quickly, and then resolve them before they can negatively impact the business. When operations are disbursed across remote sites, onsite and virtual data centers, colocation sites, cloud platforms, and third-party applications, maintaining visibility is more important than ever.
Observability is Key to Ensuring Performance Quality
To achieve the observability needed to prevent visibility gaps and maintain the integrity of remote site operations, IT needs deep packet inspection-based monitoring. Only packets can illuminate the true source of problems throughout the network. Point tools, particularly those offered by vendors, are simply too limiting in scope.
A single, vendor-independent tool - one that monitors and analyzes traffic at scale - is the best approach. Such a solution will look at the packets, analyze them in rich detail, and then provide a clear view into when and where problems are occurring within the applications themselves, as well as the service dependencies across the entire network.
Observability matters across nearly every industry. For instance, in the healthcare space, remote site observability ensures the reliable performance of telehealth services, monitors patient data and device health in remote clinics, and tracks the availability and usage of medical equipment. For utilities, it involves monitoring the performance of remote substations and power plants, detecting anomalies in pipeline pressure or water flow, and ensuring the functionality of smart meters and grid equipment.
In the case of financial services organizations, observability helps monitor ATM networks and remote bank branches for performance and security, track transaction processing and network connectivity, and ensure regulatory compliance across multiple sites. Insurance companies use observability to monitor remote claims processing centers, ensure reliable communication and data transfer between remote agents and central offices, and track the usage and health of telematics devices for auto insurance policies. In retail, remote site observability involves monitoring point-of-sale systems and network performance across store locations, ensuring the availability and performance of digital signage and in-store Wi-Fi, and tracking inventory levels and supply chain performance.
These are just some of the many industries where remote site observability is crucial.
The Value of Smart Data and Deep Packet Inspection at Scale
NETSCOUT solutions empower IT teams to capture and analyze network traffic, transforming data into a clear map of performance landscapes throughout remote sites. Having this level of visibility is essential to understanding network health, so IT can predict and address potential performance pitfalls. This provides the level of insights needed to view remote site connectivity, thus ensuring informed decisions and precise actions.
As organizations continue to expand remote operations, the complexity of managing these diverse and geographically dispersed environments grows. As a result, companies will need to leverage advanced monitoring tools and technologies to gain end-through-end network visibility. Effective monitoring will ensure the network and applications work harmoniously to support remote workforce productivity and organizational efficiency. This is essential to ensuring the best, highest-quality end user experience.
Learn more about NETSCOUT’s patented deep packet inspection technology.