3 Reasons Network Ops Should Focus on User-Experience

Increasing cloud adoption, whether because of moving internal apps to IaaS and PaaS or migrating to SaaS solutions, fundamentally alters the job of IT and network operations teams. While NetOps teams have historically focused on rolling out traditional on-premises infrastructures, they now find themselves supporting applications that are third-party operated and require a different set of network skills.

With this environment as a backdrop, here are three reasons your network team should be more experience-centric.

#1 The internet is the new enterprise network

In a recent survey issued by Dimensional Research, 95% of companies report continuing cloud-based resource utilization as their top priority. Based on this trend, the internet is utilized more and more for corporate connectivity than traditional enterprise networks.

#2 You’re responsible for the entire application delivery path, whether you own the infrastructure or not

Network teams lose a great deal of the inherent visibility and control over application performance when businesses adopt Cloud and SaaS solutions. When IT is overdependent on end-users to report performance issues, users lose confidence as the problems have already started having a material impact on productivity.

#3 Your apps aren’t served or used in a single location anymore

This is compounded by the trend of enterprise decentralization, where most enterprises now deploy a global web of remote locations, including the home office, rather than a smaller network centered tightly around hardware at HQ. As a result, network teams need to zero in on the digital experience of any app, for any user, from any location, and on any network.

Evolving traditional NetOps into experience-driven NetOps

All network operation teams follow a very familiar set of standard operating procedures to triage network performance issues. They ping, then traceroute, open trouble tickets, and escalate to engineers or architects. To follow these procedures, many teams have to utilize multiple tools and admin consoles to work through each step of the triage process.

Additionally, many organizations continue to focus solely on network performance rather than including application performance and end-user experience metrics. As a result, network teams spend the bulk of their time “firefighting” up/down issues with no idea of the impact on the customer experience.

Organizations must rethink their network operations strategies and evolve traditional NetOps into Experience-Driven NetOps. This approach is different in the way it routes user experience metrics through standardized operational workflows. This difference enables modern end-user experience monitoring and its data to live into an operational NetOps medium to not only ensure reliable network delivery but also seamless user experience.

To be effective, network teams must source end-user experience metrics to be fed into highly-scalable, vendor-agnostic network monitoring software that incorporates industry-standard operating procedures into easy, out-of-the-box triage workflows. This high level of integration guarantees isolating route changes quickly, utilizing all data sets available on the network like alarms, events, performance, faults, flows, logs, configurations, and even artificial intelligence to identify anomalies and behavioral patterns for future insights.

As a result, IT organizations can deliver modern network monitoring strategies that not only enable reliable network delivery and connections but an exceptional user experience that ultimately protects the company brand while reducing costs and risks.

You can learn more about how network teams can improve visibility into network delivery of the user experience in this eBook, Guide to Visibility Anywhere. Read now and discover how organizations become proactive in getting the metrics, alerts, and visibility needed to increase their teams’ efficiency.

Networking