I’m sure you’ll agree that cloud environments and new application architectures have drastically evolved over the past five years. With this evolution, network performance management (NPM) and application performance management (APM) solutions are pushed to the limits. Application migration from on-premises to the cloud, the popularity of SaaS applications, and the transition from virtual environments to containers have all contributed to fundamental and profound changes. As a result, there are significant blind spots that make it extremely challenging for IT teams to effectively monitor and manage the holistic hybrid infrastructure.
Complicating the lives of IT operations teams further, their responsibilities have reached far beyond the corporate network boundaries. We all have witnessed an unprecedented shift to remote work as a result of the pandemic. Now, the responsibilities of IT operations are going well into home and work-from-anywhere environments. Not only do IT teams have to grapple with performance issues, they have to deal with increased security vulnerabilities as cyber attackers have stepped up their game against vulnerable home office safeguards. Ensuring remote workers remain productive while keeping corporate data and applications secure is imperative. Yet, Digital Enterprise Journal found that it takes 197 days on average to just identify that security was breached. That is too long for operations to fly blind.
8 keys to selecting the best NPM solution
In this new norm, how do business and IT leaders ensure their organizations operate at peak performance? To start, they should consider these 8 keys to providing NetOps and SecOps teams with an ideal NPM solution:
- Monitor digital experiences beyond the network
- Integrate packets, flow and device metrics
- Proactive capabilities should alert NetOps before users notice
- Auto discover applications
- Map application and network dependencies
- Enable NetOps and SecOps with common datasets
- Provide insights into end-user experience
- Gain enterprise-wide visibility
As you develop your short list of potential NPM providers, download The Essential Network Monitoring Solution Checklist and be sure to evaluate Riverbed’s Unified Network Performance Management solution. With Riverbed, you can:
- Understand how network performance and security threats impact business initiatives
- Proactively detect and fix network performance and security problems
- Remove cloud and hybrid infrastructure blind spots
- Eliminate the finger pointing among operations teams
What criteria do you use to choose your NPM solution? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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References:
- Digital Enterprise Journal “19 key areas shaping IT performance markets in 2020” — Apr 22, 2020
- Digital Enterprise Journal