Assuring a predictable digital experience in an unpredictable world

User demand for digital delivery over the last few years is well-documented and it’s driven rapid digital transformation across a range of essential services such as payments, health, transportation, government, and more.

Every time a user joins a video call, purchases something online, sends a work email, or orders dinner from an app, that’s a digital experience. Be it a customer or employee, assuring that their usability and experience of that service is always on and always optimized is critically important.

In some instances, life can grind to a halt when these services become unavailable. Stranded at a point-of-sale without an alternate way to pay; at an airport check-in kiosk with cancelled flights and no obvious way home; or at a hospital that’s lost access to electronic medical records or appointment schedules; the impact of a disrupted digital service can be seminal.

This may seem like a high bar, but digital experience has always come with high expectations. In today’s digital economy, assurance that a disruption to a digital experience can be quickly resolved is pivotal.

Digital experience delivery goes global

Where organizations run into challenges is in not properly seeing the intricacies of how the delivery of a digital experience reaches users.

The data that powers digital experiences runs over a complex web of infrastructure and distributed interdependencies. Anything directly owned can be mapped out. But more and more parts of digital experience delivery rely on unowned – not directly owned – infrastructure: public cloud environments, and public and private paths across the Internet.

Though operated by someone else, it needs to be to the same performance, resilience, and uptime standards as the owned infrastructure. Where that performance starts to slip, it must be recognized and corrected. That diagnosis and course correction is only possible with holistic visibility into and across the entirety of this global area network of owned and unowned infrastructure and services.

As IDC’s Network Observability and Automation Director Mark Leary says, “Digital experiences are determined by an increasingly complex technology infrastructure where networks, data centers, cloud services, security mechanisms, endpoints, and an ever-growing set of data and applications must all work in concert. Factor in the accelerating use of external systems and services within the infrastructure and further complications arise in measuring, managing, and, ultimately, delivering an overarching positive digital experience to all.”

Digital Experience Assurance is an emerging IT management discipline that maps and visualizes the unowned portion of digital delivery and joins it up with the owned portion, to create a unified view and understanding of how an experience is delivered to users.

It’s an approach based on access to data across internal and external environments at scale. By leveraging this data insight across domains along with AI, it becomes possible to quickly pinpoint the source of an issue and generate recommendations to guide or automate action across both owned and unowned infrastructure and environments.

The ability to correlate, analyze, diagnose, predict, optimize, and remediate with little or no manual intervention can be the difference between a 4-hour outage and a 4-minute disruption. When digital functions in this way, predictable operation and performance are achieved, creating the kinds of flawless digital experiences that everyone wants.

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