28 March 2024
Larry Goldman, director, product marketing, Progress
Accelerated by public cloud adoption, IT environments are evolving rapidly to become more agile and ready to quickly respond to the needs of business departments. In fact, research conducted by analysts at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) revealed that 96% of enterprises now use the public cloud (IaaS or SaaS).
This has given rise to the development of hybrid cloud environments that combine private data centres with public clouds, with many organisations using two or more public cloud services (IaaS and PaaS). But with the opportunity created by this technology comes the challenges of managing and securing data across multiple locations.
The challenge to manage distributed environments
With IT environments becoming more distributed and complex, it’s a serious challenge for CIOs and IT leaders to manage these environments and to mitigate threats, vulnerabilities, and inefficiencies in their networks.
The complexity of these highly distributed environments is compounded by organisations’ increasing use of data generated in edge environments and deploying applications there to gain real-time business insight, ensure high-quality services and optimise processes. ESG research shows that 94% of enterprises consider edge computing as one of their top ten investment priorities.
The importance of network visibility
With the majority of enterprises now engaged to some extent in digital transformation initiatives, many organisations have a hybrid cloud setup, where applications can be deployed in any combination of private data centres, multiple public clouds and edge locations. At the same time, employees and IoT devices accessing these applications do so from home or other remote locations.
Some of the top IT goals for these types of transformation projects include increasing operational efficiency and providing a better and more differentiated customer experience. To achieve these objectives, enterprises must leverage information available in the underlying network infrastructure and network traffic to ensure secure connectivity between applications, remote workers and edge devices. Successfully managing these highly distributed but connected environments requires the ability to gain detailed, end-to-end network visibility and collect and correlate that data.
Advantages of comprehensive network visibility
The key to successfully managing these connected but highly distributed environments is the ability to gain detailed, end-to-end network visibility. This helps organisations best adapt to rapid change and high levels of dispersion. Additional benefits of achieving this level of visibility are to reduce operational costs and optimise their environment management activities.
This will also play a vital role in proactive corporate defence strategies, as well as offering enterprises knowledge about the applications running on their networks and guaranteed access to them. This makes it easier to solve problems with any application on a priority basis and can enhance business continuity, reducing the time required to restore a given environment to work.
To gain true network visibility, a network monitoring platform must be implemented that can provide complete visibility of their network infrastructure whilst easily integrating with other business systems. This will provide deep, detailed visibility into network device settings and network traffic to ensure a better experience, higher levels of security and improved operational efficiency.
An agile and comprehensive network monitoring solution goes beyond monitoring known metrics and events and allows network operations teams to focus on capturing as much data as possible to detect potential future events as new applications and network architectures gain popularity; for instance, microservices applications or multi-cloud networks. This approach directs network operations teams beyond implementing a single, narrow-focused product towards taking the broadest possible view of their network environment to enable them to adapt to rapid change.
Taking a holistic view of application management
Achieving this level of network visibility will also help companies reduce operational costs and optimise their environment management activities. Given their highly distributed nature, it’s almost impossible for individual tools to provide an optimal comprehensive view. Therefore, enterprises should think proactively about implementing a platform that can take a holistic view of their network infrastructure and has the ability to easily integrate with other business systems.
