End-user experience and Application performance are enhanced significantly with Remote Office Visibility - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India & SAARC, NETSCOUT
Covid -19 has created new ways of working with shift in business models. Work from home (WFH) culture is becoming the new normal with the 4th wave of the pandemic around the corner, driving organisations to further embrace hybrid model of work. This new system will support in retaining existing employees and attracting new talent.
Employees depend on remote access to services hosted by corporate networks, including data-centre based voice systems and web applications. It becomes more challenging to guarantee reliability, responsiveness and end-user experience, irrespective of how users are connecting and from which location. In addition to other aspects of transformed business that have to be managed, IT teams have to assure end-user experience and application performance.
Moving services to cloud and infrastructures to co-locations, besides adopting new software-as-a-service applications, have all led to more complexities in the entire ecosystems. Unfortunately, both VPN and VDI, the earlier-generation technologies are not suitable for the WFH era, where VPN concentrator is now the favourite target for DDoS attacks. Bad actors are aware of the huge impact the organisation will have when relatively small DDoS state exhaustion attack against VPN concentrators that are running at or near connection capacity. Filling VPN concentrators with illegitimate connections denies connections to a legitimate WFH workforce, impacting the productivity, especially when the VPN connections have expanded dramatically with the new remote working culture. VDI, being sensitive to network performance is another challenge for the IT team.
IT teams are trying to gain the required visibility and control for troubleshooting and addressing performance issues for better digital employee experience. This next-gen corporate infrastructure includes explosion of edges and data centre or cloud service edge, with visibility across these edges being crucial. Only a vendor agnostic visibility will be able to identify these underlying issues.
Let us take the case of a global software leader who has 4 decades of delivering products to businesses, with offices across North America, EMEA, Latin America and Asia as employees have to access their corporate network in their jobs. Several years earlier, the organisation had already implemented NETSCOUT® nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and nGeniusPULSE system to ensure high-quality performance of the voice, video and business data services.
The period which started with the onset of Covid-19 pandemic saw data centre upgrades, digital transformations and service migrations. The organisation wanted to expand visibility to their upgraded segments in the data centre, major remote offices and recently migrated cloud-based applications and services. It also wanted to ensure performance and availability of their critical business applications at its remote network and client edges. For service edge visibility into network and application performance and management of the critical business services NETSCOUT® nGeniusONE and InfiniStreamNG were already leveraged in the organisation’s data centre.
NETSCOUT’s technology innovations in Smart Edge Monitoring delivered visibility expansion to further reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK), which brought about meaningful improvements in Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) issues in the complex global enterprise environments. NETSCOUT’s Smart Edge Monitoring helped in providing the most comprehensive monitoring, trending and analysis for the IT organisation. This proactively supported employee digital experience in its remote and corporate locations, and the performance of applications was assured too, wherever they were hosted.
NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence® (ASI) technology leveraged the high-value packet traffic to generate ‘smart data’ for smarter analytics to assure performance, manage risk, feed security analysis and facilitate superior decision-making, regarding the application and network services.
WFH individuals were thus able to have best digital employee experience with any application, from anywhere.
Visibility into user activity, network performance and application dependencies is crucial to develop a roadmap in an edge computing environment, for better flexibility, performance, security as well as enhanced user experience for the current and future workforce.