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Ensuring Business Continuity within the Borderless Enterprise in 2015

Bruce Kosbab

The borderless enterprise will become a topic of increasing prevalence in 2015. This phenomenon is being driven by the adoption of cloud, mobile devices and wireless access. The underlying technologies have acted as a catalyst for the transformation currently taking place in what has traditionally been thought of as the enterprise network. As far as the enterprise itself is concerned, the perimeters are disappearing.

As borderless enterprises proliferate, IT teams are experiencing new difficulties in ensuring Quality of Experience while continuing to support the business objectives of their workforce.

Cloud technologies, particularly Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, have enabled non-IT groups within the enterprise to treat the cloud like a veritable IT vending machine. In a borderless enterprise, business operations teams, sales, marketing, manufacturing, HR and the line of business groups, can procure and implement their own applications, often without IT involvement.

This dynamic is a blessing and a curse for network teams within enterprises. With this newfound flexibility comes often-overlooked challenges and hurdles for IT teams. Business users are accessing applications, hosted in the cloud and purchased by enterprise business executives (not IT), while using their own devices to access those applications, over third-party infrastructure, which IT neither owns nor manages. All of this is going on and IT is still responsible for ensuring the end-user experience of all of those users, regardless of how, when, where and what applications they are using.

The five greatest challenges for ensuring Quality of Experience in a borderless enterprise include:

1. IT is caught unaware

Once upon a time, new application deployments were well planned, with change management processes, user acceptance testing and organization-wide communications. Today, this is no longer the case. End users bypass the traditional IT process because they can, resulting in faster deployment and, arguably, increased business efficiency. Yet when problems occur, the network team is still required to solve them even though they may have never initiated the deployment..

2. The blame game intensifies

Organizations often look for a scapegoat when things go wrong. In a borderless enterprise, finding someone to blame becomes more complex because users are now involved in choosing and deploying applications and services without input from IT teams. This leads to longer problem resolution times due to less clarity of the root cause.

3. Heightened complexity for enterprise IT

Current technology trends, user mobility and behavior drive IT complexity. While the cloud can simplify the enterprise, the ease with which business users can deploy new technology introduces much more complexity in the delivery chain than ever before.

4. Reduced visibility

IT teams do not have the same level of visibility in managing the end-user experience of cloud applications compared with on-premise applications. Applications that once ran inside a controlled corporate network are now running in any number of locations in the cloud. Their performance relies on the best-effort nature of the Internet, making it difficult for network teams to gather the necessary data to address application and network problems. Contributing to the blindness is that mobile users use third-party networks, which IT departments have no visibility into.

5. Many problems can’t be solved with a product

Many problems can’t be solved with just the product. Instead of simply improving the speed at which problems are found and fixed, organizations need to reduce overall occurrences. The key is to strategically choose tool vendors and service providers, create processes for adopting cloud applications, instill proactive management procedures, change the design of the enterprise architecture and acquire new IT skillsets.

To evolve along with the borderless enterprise of 2015, organizations need to commit to measuring true Quality of Experience for end-users, evaluating service level agreements (SLAs) of SaaS providers, establishing standard operating procedures for the adoption of cloud technologies and applications, and choosing tools that work harmoniously within the existing ecosystem and support primary IT objectives.

Bruce Kosbab is CTO of Fluke Networks.

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Ensuring Business Continuity within the Borderless Enterprise in 2015

Bruce Kosbab

The borderless enterprise will become a topic of increasing prevalence in 2015. This phenomenon is being driven by the adoption of cloud, mobile devices and wireless access. The underlying technologies have acted as a catalyst for the transformation currently taking place in what has traditionally been thought of as the enterprise network. As far as the enterprise itself is concerned, the perimeters are disappearing.

As borderless enterprises proliferate, IT teams are experiencing new difficulties in ensuring Quality of Experience while continuing to support the business objectives of their workforce.

Cloud technologies, particularly Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, have enabled non-IT groups within the enterprise to treat the cloud like a veritable IT vending machine. In a borderless enterprise, business operations teams, sales, marketing, manufacturing, HR and the line of business groups, can procure and implement their own applications, often without IT involvement.

This dynamic is a blessing and a curse for network teams within enterprises. With this newfound flexibility comes often-overlooked challenges and hurdles for IT teams. Business users are accessing applications, hosted in the cloud and purchased by enterprise business executives (not IT), while using their own devices to access those applications, over third-party infrastructure, which IT neither owns nor manages. All of this is going on and IT is still responsible for ensuring the end-user experience of all of those users, regardless of how, when, where and what applications they are using.

The five greatest challenges for ensuring Quality of Experience in a borderless enterprise include:

1. IT is caught unaware

Once upon a time, new application deployments were well planned, with change management processes, user acceptance testing and organization-wide communications. Today, this is no longer the case. End users bypass the traditional IT process because they can, resulting in faster deployment and, arguably, increased business efficiency. Yet when problems occur, the network team is still required to solve them even though they may have never initiated the deployment..

2. The blame game intensifies

Organizations often look for a scapegoat when things go wrong. In a borderless enterprise, finding someone to blame becomes more complex because users are now involved in choosing and deploying applications and services without input from IT teams. This leads to longer problem resolution times due to less clarity of the root cause.

3. Heightened complexity for enterprise IT

Current technology trends, user mobility and behavior drive IT complexity. While the cloud can simplify the enterprise, the ease with which business users can deploy new technology introduces much more complexity in the delivery chain than ever before.

4. Reduced visibility

IT teams do not have the same level of visibility in managing the end-user experience of cloud applications compared with on-premise applications. Applications that once ran inside a controlled corporate network are now running in any number of locations in the cloud. Their performance relies on the best-effort nature of the Internet, making it difficult for network teams to gather the necessary data to address application and network problems. Contributing to the blindness is that mobile users use third-party networks, which IT departments have no visibility into.

5. Many problems can’t be solved with a product

Many problems can’t be solved with just the product. Instead of simply improving the speed at which problems are found and fixed, organizations need to reduce overall occurrences. The key is to strategically choose tool vendors and service providers, create processes for adopting cloud applications, instill proactive management procedures, change the design of the enterprise architecture and acquire new IT skillsets.

To evolve along with the borderless enterprise of 2015, organizations need to commit to measuring true Quality of Experience for end-users, evaluating service level agreements (SLAs) of SaaS providers, establishing standard operating procedures for the adoption of cloud technologies and applications, and choosing tools that work harmoniously within the existing ecosystem and support primary IT objectives.

Bruce Kosbab is CTO of Fluke Networks.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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