Movin’ On Up… to the Cloud and Network Edge

Many IT organizations have largely moved past the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and its resultant challenges to the network—and have begun to move forward with more strategic initiatives to meet the dynamic technology infrastructure demands of the business. This has led to wider adoption of cloud services and an acceleration to the network edge.

With these advancements have come new challenges to the network, as well as to those professionals responsible for maintaining performance, security, and—most importantly—the end-user experience.

Facing Network Management Challenges

As enterprises increasingly embrace cloud services and utilize the ever-shifting network edge, IT must deal with a host of vexing challenges, including the following:

• Increasing complexity and rising costs. As new devices, endpoints, applications, cloud services, and providers are added to the network, the complexity IT must deal with grows exponentially. In addition to making problem resolution more difficult and time-consuming, the overall cost of maintaining and managing networks goes up.

• Loss of visibility and control. As cloud services are introduced into the environment, visibility and control becomes far more difficult. Similarly limited visibility and control occurs at the network edge, making it harder for IT to assure network and application performance.

• Inferior and inconsistent network access and service levels. Network downtime, slowdowns, and breaches have an immediate and lasting impact on business productivity and profitability. Not only that, but IT credibility is on the line when network service quality falters.

The Need for Cloud-Through-Client Visibility and Control

As rapid adoption of cloud services and expansion of the network edge put greater strains on IT, the need for network analytics solutions to improve visibility into and deliver improved control over these vital resources increases.

Although cloud service providers do offer insights on select data, and application performance monitoring (APM) solutions can provide a measure of visibility, neither delivers the detailed intelligence and insights into the performance of network and computing components necessary for fully understanding the impact to the user experience.

To gain a complete picture, IT must leverage high-quality data focused on traffic movement, device status, bandwidth utilization, and user experience. This comprehensive data can be used for in-depth analysis that leads to quicker problem resolution, the ability to spot issues and threats sooner, and proactive network optimization.

Intelligence gathered from within the cloud, across multiple clouds, and at the edge provides IT with a more thorough picture into cloud services and service levels. This can lead to more accurate cloud service oversight and validation and more timely identification of cloud-related problems, thus speeding up repairs.

When armed with detailed visibility and control of the core/edge infrastructure, cloud services, and client experiences—eliminating blinds spots—IT gains a complete view that allows for highly capable analysis. Such analysis is the key to reducing repair time and lightening the IT load.

Download the IDC white paper to learn more.