When it comes to digital transformation and cloud-first strategies, the Netherlands is leading. Big data, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) are all firmly established trends among forward-looking Dutch organisations. In order to maximise the potential of these technologies, these organisations must firstly ensure that the network infrastructure is capable of supporting them optimally. To do so, organisations should fully embrace the cloud, commit to a software-defined network and measure the progress of their strategy against company objectives.
Embracing the cloud and committing to a software-defined network generally aren’t the problem. But what many companies are struggling with is measuring the progress and impact of their strategy. Often, many of the technologies they use to measure only estimate what the end-user sees, resulting in an IT monitoring visibility gap. What are the consequences of such a gap and how can these issues be resolved so you can truly offer an optimal user experience?
The visibility gap and its consequences
It often turns out that even though the cloud environment has been designed to make things easier for end-users, there’s still very little actual focus on the end-users themselves. Most problems are met with a reactive response, meaning performance of the environment is only measured when it’s not up to standards.
Additionally, many companies work with different silos, which means that every department solves only its own issues and a clear overview is missing. The result? The IT department’s monitoring tools might be showing that everything is good to go, but your end-users are actually complaining of slow application performance or other application issues.
What this visibility gap leads to, is a poor user experience and problems for both IT and the business. For instance, it could lead to reduced productivity, because users have to wait for a solution and are unable to complete their work, ultimately impacting the company’s bottom line. Another consequence is Shadow IT, which means users start looking for their own solutions because they’re tired of waiting, opening the company’s network up to possible cyberattacks. And lastly, the visibility gap may lead to an overall reduced confidence in the IT department.
Focus on the end user experience
What is needed is a technology that closes this IT monitoring visibility gap with accurate, real-time information about how end-users actually experience and interact with their applications, devices, and network. This can be achieved by measuring three streams of data that make up the true user experience, namely: user interactions, device health and performance, and application performance.
Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity provides those capabilities and offers immediate insight in how application performance affects productivity by analysing elements such as application usage, wait time and crashes. Furthermore, it proactively identifies problems by generating a baseline for every application, device and user performance metric that’s collected. This allows for quicker solutions. And lastly, the technology offers additional analytics that allows for an accurate assessment of the impact of IT on the end user experience.
By gaining insights on the actual end-user experience, companies are able to close the IT monitoring visibility gap that stands in the way of their digital transformation progress. This new analytical information allows companies to ensure that their network is effectively capable of supporting digital transformation, so they can maximize the potential of the technologies that are part of this transformation and continue to be leading in their respective markets.
By Wim Timmer
Published with permission from Riverbed.