How to take control of your network

As global organisations switch on to the reality of digital transformation, customer experience has become a key focus.

CIOs are being tasked with providing the very best experience right across their business and the wider eco-system. This includes end-customers, strategic partners, third-party collaborators and locally-based staff as part of a globally dispersed, and increasingly mobile, workforce.

From customers contacting service teams via web chat to employees collaborating using the latest tools, users of corporate applications expect high-quality experiences. With a growing number of enterprises moving to the cloud and adopting new digital strategies, the CIO needs greater visibility of how their networks and applications are performing. Availability, performance and security are essential when integrating cloud-based services into WAN environments and moving mission-critical workloads and business processes: for example, SAP, Salesforce.com and Office 365. By controlling what’s happening on the corporate network, they can ensure great user experiences, inform strategic decisions and accelerate troubleshooting.

But the reality is that the promise of digital is not living up to expectations and in many cases, it’s becoming even harder to operate in an increasingly cloud-oriented world.

Customers ask me how they can ensure visibility and how they can track and measure how well their new applications are performing against current state. And, with continued pressure on margins and budgets and resource-constrained IT teams, how can this be achieved cost efficiently as-a-Service?

The application landscape of a multinational organisation is complex and the impact of applications on the network and end-user experience is unknown, which can harm the successful transition to SD-WAN and the adoption of cloud. I also see many customers who are using multiple tools or face conflicts between network and IT teams.

Visibility solutions give global enterprises a managed and cost-effective way to deliver the very best user experience as part of their digital transformation journey.  For example, a large retail chain faced application performance issues, and the network was being blamed. They were able to locate the root cause of the issue – vendor updates were running during peak periods – and consequently reduce outages by 90 per cent. Another organisation reduced their mean time to repair from an average of six to 12 months to less than a week through network visibility.

And because they can be delivered as-a-Service, it helps reduce capital expenditure and allows services to be flexed as demand changes.

So, when customers ask me those questions, I tell them it’s easy to take control of your network to deliver optimum customer experience and do it efficiently.

Find out how you can improve the performance of your business critical apps and processes and watch our webinar to learn how to obtain full end-to-end performance visibility and control of your global applications and network infrastructure.