29 August 2024
Martin Saunders, chief operating officer, Highlight
IT and network managers face considerable constraints on their budgets. With funds shrinking due to inflation and downward pressures to get more for less, many are reevaluating their network infrastructure. This is a good area to review particularly since 70-80% of many IT networking budgets are spent on the underlay connectivity such as Ethernet and broadband.
Running a network hotter may sound hazardous, particularly since any downtime is hugely expensive for an organisation. However, the latest IT observation tools for both the network and applications, alongside intelligent SD-WAN software, can bring all the pieces of the puzzle together and make it possible to run the network hotter without sacrificing performance or reliability.
Service observability platforms are key to understanding how much network capacity an organisation genuinely needs and where capacity can be reduced whilst maintaining a good quality user experience. With full-service observability, organisations can identify if something is starting to go wrong and then utilise proactive support processes to ensure there are no outages.
Bring on the heat!
Network capacity and performance are the first elements that need to be understood to deliver the best possible user experience at the most optimal cost. A large cause of cost inefficiency is when network connections are either massively over specified and underutilised or they are underspecified and suffer performance issues at peak times. The former means overpaying and limiting the reach of budgets and the latter results in business operations being directly impacted by poor performance.
The problem when trying to ‘right size’ networks is that it can be difficult to properly measure and estimate network capacity requirements. This is where network observability becomes essential. Having a top-level view of different locations and metrics that show the performance and utilisation of all related connections over time is essential to making effective data-backed capacity decisions.
An extra source of headroom in SD-WAN
However, even when taking utilisation and performance trends into account using past report data, there are bound to be unforeseen events and new peaks that are difficult to predict. This is where technology like SD-WAN can come to the rescue.
The value of SD-WAN is its clever routing of traffic to the least congested route. Currently, most SD-WAN deployments are applying this intelligence to empty networks with no decisions to make. When organisations look to reduce the capacity of their underlay connectivity, deploying intelligent SD-WAN can be highly effective and ensure the users’ digital experience of their applications remains good.
The network isn’t always to blame…
The next piece of the puzzle is the users’ digital application experience and understanding if users are having a good or bad time. With business relying more and more on applications hosted in the cloud, it’s important to distinguish between issues occurring because of the underlying network as opposed to problems with those cloud providers. This is especially true when running an optimised network.
Digital experience monitoring needs to be as unintrusive as possible whilst also being easy to deploy. The latest approach is to use agents with synthetic transactions that mimic a user accessing applications such as Salesforce, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft 365. In addition, organisations like Cisco ThousandEyes and Meraki are building agents into its equipment to capture application performance. These developments deliver a good indication of a user’s digital experience when using the same network.
Unified service observability
If a network is going to be optimised, the speed of response is vital, particularly in fast-paced industries such as retail or finance. The main problem is when managers use separate monitoring tools with isolated displays that present information in technical terms. It can then take valuable time and effort to identify if there is an issue and then translate the information into a form that can be understood by non-technical stakeholders.
Service observability tools that have easy-to-understand charts and diagrams enable managers to gain a fast overview of how the network, their application experience and SD-WAN are performing in one single informative view. It can show managers exactly where to direct their attention if something is about to go wrong with time to fix it. For example, Visionist, a provider of IT services to UK government departments, used the Highlight Observability Platform to double its visibility of a department’s infrastructure and achieve a 60% increase in proactive detection of issues with faster resolution times.
By combining the insights of network performance, the digital experience and SD-WAN into one observability platform, managers can clearly identify if they can reduce the overall capacity on the underlay and perhaps replace an expensive Ethernet network with a mix of broadband and cellular connections, redeploying those funds to other important areas. Overall, it can give managers far greater control over the services they deliver to their users and how they manage their service providers.
