Optimizing Time to Insight to Power Business Success
March 06, 2018

Michael Segal
NetScout

Share this

Businesses everywhere continually strive for greater efficiency.

By way of illustration, more than a third of IT professionals cite "moving faster" as their top goal for 2018, and improving the efficiency of operations was one of the top three stated business objectives for organizations considering digital transformation initiatives.

As a result, Time To Insight, or TTI, which refers to the measure of the time it takes to collect, organize, and analyze the amount of information necessary to generate the intelligence an organization requires, has become intrinsic to business success.

81% of organizations say an hour of downtime costs them over $300,000

In today's competitive environment, where everything happens in real time, it's no longer viable to take hours — or even days — to analyze the volume and variety of data needed to provide a business with any meaningful insight. In addition, service downtime can have huge implications for businesses; 81% of organizations say an hour of downtime costs them over $300,000. Therefore, the shorter a company's TTI, the faster, more responsive, more efficient and more profitable they will be.

However, for businesses to gain the insight, they need to resolve issues or mitigate risks in the quickest possible time, they need to adjust their approach to data.

Real-Time Meaningful and Actionable Insights

It has been suggested that 90 percent of all the world's data has been created within the last two years. With such explosive growth and evolution of advanced analytics techniques that can convert this information into actionable intelligence, data is now widely considered to be as valuable as oil. As a result, businesses have been collecting and storing increasingly large volumes of information of data from a myriad of devices, systems and applications in the hope that it will become lucrative.

But, as the volume of data continues to grow, companies need to consider re-evaluating the way they handle data, and look toward a smart data approach. This involves harvesting all the important information from every action and transaction that traverses the entire enterprise infrastructure through traffic flows and compressing it into metadata at its source.

Importantly, a smart data approach represents greater efficiency. Once collected, smart data is normalized, organized, structured in a service-contextual fashion, and made available in real-time, all of which will significantly increase the efficiencies of analytics, improve the quality of the intelligence and reduce an organization's TTI.

Furthermore, smart data offers a high level of veracity. Constant monitoring of the wire data that traverses the infrastructure allows users to harvest all relevant key service assurance and threat indicators, which means that rather than simply having a select snapshot of sampled data, businesses are able to access contextualized data that provides real-time, continuous, and actionable insights across their entire IT infrastructure.

Cutting Costs

In addition, smart data's advantages can extend beyond just business efficiencies.

The traditional approach to service assurance, threat management, and business analytics involves collecting large amounts of data from multiple systems, applications and infrastructure components and sending it to a central location for storage and processing. This approach increases the required storage, processing and networking capacity and cost and has environmental implications, when you consider that server farms and networks account for 50 percent of the electricity consumption in our connected world.

With a smart data approach, the volume of the collected data is significantly compressed, since the raw traffic flows are processed at the source and metadata is created. It is therefore possible to keep only the data that is valuable for the task at hand, and discard the unnecessary overhead, thus both saving costs and reducing energy consumption.

What's more, as business everywhere undergo a form of digital transformation to enhance the speed and agility of their operations, smart data is able to significantly improve their Time To Insight, in strategic areas of service assurance and threat management. Through this approach, they are able to gain an additional edge in an increasingly competitive market. Considering the overwhelming benefits smart data can offer, it won't be long before it becomes the dominant approach to service assurance, threat management, operations management and business analytics.

Michael Segal is VP of Strategy at NetScout
Share this

The Latest

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...

March 14, 2024

The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...

March 13, 2024

In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...

March 12, 2024

eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...

March 11, 2024

Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...

March 07, 2024
In this digital era, consumers prefer a seamless user experience, and here, the significance of performance testing cannot be overstated. Application performance testing is essential in ensuring that your software products, websites, or other related systems operate seamlessly under varying conditions. However, the cost of poor performance extends beyond technical glitches and slow load times; it can directly affect customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Understand the tangible and intangible consequences of poor application performance and how it can affect your business ...
March 06, 2024

Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...

March 05, 2024

Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...