In a recent survey on the state of network operations, 77% reported that network operations is significantly more complex today than in years past, while 82% reported network visibility blind spots because of ISP, cloud and SaaS adoption and 41% sited a lack of skilled personnel as the number one challenge to their NetOps success.
With most of today’s network delivery experiences happening over home Wi-Fi, ISP and cloud networks, it is not surprising that the data above speaks volumes about how hard it is to manage today’s network architectures.
Software vendors can help simplify the day-to-day operations for network teams by innovating in the following three ways:
Help enterprises embrace the new network delivery path. Users are everywhere, working over public networks, accessing business critical apps in cloud provider networks. There is no private data center in this new network path. This is why 82% reported network visibility blind spots because of ISP, cloud and SaaS adoption.
Expanding operational visibility into these unmanaged networks enables network teams to gain fast and intelligent insights into the performance of ISP and cloud providers with concrete data that removes these blind spots and quickly pinpoints performance issues in home Wi-Fi networks, residential ISP outages or even packet loss or limited bandwidth in cloud networks. Innovation like this can hold ISP and cloud providers accountable while reducing war room scenarios and long triage times.
Work from actionable data sets collected in unmanaged networks. Now that operational visibility is expanded into every area of the new network delivery path, there is a gold mine of data that can be collected, analyzed and then surfaced to provide intelligent and actionable insights that uncover the root cause directly from the alarm received in the network operations center (NOC). An example of this can be seen below. Unacceptable network performance can be seen across this network path that includes home Wi-Fi, ISP and cloud networks.
Trust but validate the new network delivery path. Today’s networks are more difficult to monitor when you don’t own the underlying infrastructure. Vendors should implement synthetic network testing to understand the performance of every single device in the network delivery path. Validation like this can uncover potential bottlenecks like limited capacity or even packet loss in an ISP or cloud providers networks. When rolling out new network deployments or new applications hosted in the cloud, network delivery validation is mandatory to ensure these unmanaged networks provide the same user experience and quality you would expect from the same application you would’ve had hosted in your enterprise data center years ago.
The days of blaming the app team, the database team or the server team are over. Intelligent network delivery analysis is available to every NetOps team today to prove your innocence, you’ve just got to remove the blinders.