Patrick Ostiguy is Founder and Executive Chairman at Accedian, provider of network performance and end-user experience analytics solutions.
getty
Covid-19 has changed the world in so many different ways. But perhaps most noticeably, it forced employers to adapt and support mass remote working at astonishing speed. In October, Gallup confirmed that well over half of Americans were working either always (33%) or sometimes (25%) from locations other than the office.
Suddenly, network performance was no longer just a metric for IT departments but one to concern business leaders and boards. If staff have problems using the applications they need to do their jobs, it can ramp up IT costs and productivity losses at exactly the time when organizations most need to rein in expenditure and maximize output.
This is where network monitoring and cloud application observability come to play a crucial role. But not all options are created equal.
The Workplace Evolves
The picture across America is the same: The majority of workers are no longer stuck in office locations on local area networks (LANs). Almost overnight, employers had to swallow their concerns and get to work on what has been described as the largest work-from-home experiment ever conducted.
Today, users of the same corporate applications and remote access infrastructure may not even be located in the same cities. They could theoretically be anywhere in the country and may move about at any point. Yet they still expect and need to receive a high-quality, consistent end-user experience, no matter where they are and what devices they’re using.
Many of these workers may be using corporate VPNs to securely access company systems and resources. Even more may also be trying to access cloud-based applications for word processing, team collaboration and videoconferencing, customer communications, enterprise software like ERP, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and much more. This is digital transformation on an unprecedented scale. The CEO of Zoom said its number of daily meeting participants grew from 10 million in December 2019 to roughly 200 million by March 2020.
Yet at the same time, the newly distributed workforce has shone an uncompromising light on many of the growing challenges facing corporate NetOps teams. A poll my company took of over 1,000 U.S. IT decision-makers in July 2020 revealed that 40% experience network brownouts several times a week, and 1 in 5 do so daily. Since lockdowns began, end-user complaints about application performance soared by 60% due to performance degradations, excessive slowdowns and network congestion. Network problems should rarely get so bad that end users are forced to report the issue.
Quality And Complexity
A confluence of challenges threatens to flood these organizations, tie up their IT teams on expensive, reactive troubleshooting, and leave home working employees high and dry. VPNs are a notable chokepoint. The truth is that remote access infrastructure in most organizations simply wasn’t designed for mass simultaneous use, and it wasn’t set up for mainly inbound traffic.
Between March 8 and March 20 of last year, the U.S. alone saw a 124% increase in VPN usage, according to one estimate. That has led to performance problems, especially in midsized firms with 2,000-plus employees because they’re less likely to have the budget for a redundant architecture and may have had less to spend in general on network performance solutions.
The cloud adds an extra layer of complexity for many NetOps managers. Organizations are accelerating their migration plans to SaaS and IaaS environments to drive productivity, streamline business processes and trim costs. But many network performance monitoring solutions don’t work effectively in the cloud from an operational viability or cost-effectiveness perspective.
According to the Enterprise Management Associates Network Management Megatrends 2020 report, 40% of all traffic on an average enterprise network is from external cloud apps. Yet 61% of enterprises claim the cloud networking support offered by their network management tools could be better.
If IT bosses can’t get the insight they need into network performance, it will be much harder to ascertain the true cause of application issues. In this regard, more attention should be paid to quality of experience (QoE) alongside traditional quality of service (QoS). While QoS is useful for measuring technical performance by focusing on characteristics like latency, jitter, packet loss, etc., it only tells part of the story. QoE looks at the impact of network behavior on the end user by taking a more granular approach to data analysis that goes beyond merely measuring the efficiency of data transport across the network.
Time To Get Proactive
At a fundamental level, enhancing preparedness helps to minimize business risk and improve your chances of success with any given goal. Network monitoring and cloud application observability are no different. This means getting proactive about measuring performance so that you can start identifying problems before they affect end users and their QoE.
Software-based remote monitoring tools install agents at various points on the network to do exactly this, injecting test packets to measure KPIs like packet loss and latency. That way you can find out and fix problems ahead of time. Being able to do so remotely is also a key consideration. In a new era of distributed working, it can save IT valuable time and protect engineers from the health risks they could encounter if forced out in the field.
However, active monitoring is not a silver bullet, which is why it must be combined with passive monitoring that looks at general traffic characteristics. The ideal system will feed both into a centralized AI-powered analytics engine to provide real-time alerts for IT to troubleshoot. It goes without saying that any tools must also have that all-important visibility into all traffic traversing on-premises, private and public cloud networks.
According to Gallup, two-thirds of American workers who have been working remotely during the pandemic want to continue doing so after the pandemic. That should make improvements to network performance monitoring a priority for 2021.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
