How to de-risk your digital transformation

Deliver great user experience through improved visibility and performance management

Delivering a good user experience has always been important, but recent events have made it strategically essential.

The surge in home working triggered by the pandemic has thrown it into the spotlight. Added to this, the move to cloud, the increase in software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, and the growth in video traffic have all been putting pressure on corporate networks.

Many organizations face challenges in delivering a great user experience, mainly around network visibility, network flexibility, and application performance management. Yet it’s possible to overcome them by applying a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) management overlay on an existing network and by using integrated visibility and network performance management technologies.

 

The surge is home working triggered by the pandemic has thrown user experience into the spotlight.

You can’t manage what you can’t see

Lack of visibility is a widespread challenge which underlies the vast majority of network and application performance issues. And it’s been getting harder over the last few years due to the growth of cloud.

51% of organizations say getting full visibility into network performance has become more difficult over the last 24 months.
Digital Enterprise Journal, March 2020

The default response of many organizations is to buy more network monitoring tools. A Riverbed study on visibility and network performance found that 67% of organizations have between three and six tools.

While understandable, this approach places an unnecessary management overhead on network operations teams. They end up spending a lot of their time extracting diagnostic data from multiple tools and sending it to vendors or service providers to resolve.

What they really need is integrated monitoring that gives them actionable real-time insight to reduce resolution time and ideally avoid incidents entirely.

An agile organization needs an agile network

Many corporate networks were designed before the cloud age. Their architecture forces data traffic through a central data center, which can cause latency issues when using SaaS services.
Hybrid SD-WANs offer a wider choice of connection types for different types of traffic, allowing network managers to reduce congestion on the corporate WAN and improve user experience while reducing data transport and bandwidth costs.

An SD-WAN management layer can provide a central source of actionable insight into network and application performance. This will eliminate finger-pointing between vendors, speed up fault resolution, and improve the service experience for users.

Organizations can improve data flows across their network, between data centers, clouds, and users with solutions like the WAN Optimization.

An SD-WAN management layer helps give organizations the agile network they need.

Better network visibility de-risks digital transformation

Transformation always entails some risk. When you’re placing an organization’s core business processes into new digital systems you need to be confident that they’ll work well.

58% of organizations say they have blind spots in the digital delivery chain.
Digital Enterprise Journal, “19 key areas shaping IT performance markets in 2020”, April 2020

By leveraging the visibility, flexibility, and control afforded by SD-WAN, combined with network optimization and acceleration technologies, it’s possible to ensure reliable application performance both during and after a transformation.

This approach will also give transformation leaders the insight they need to measure achievements against objectives and gather the data for future business cases.

Where to start

Through our partnership with Riverbed, we can provide you with the WAN optimization and acceleration technology you need to get visibility and control over your network and improve application performance. Our SD-WAN experts are here to help you achieve proactive, automated, real time monitoring to support your digital transformation.

To help you understand the readiness of your network and IT infrastructure to cope with the transformational changes, and the effect they have on the user experience for your employees and customers, we’ve created a short assessment tool, which will provide you with a personalised report and recommendations.