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NAPM Investment: Why the Value Extends Far Beyond the Network

Sergio Bea
Accedian

Over the last decade, the public cloud has completely transformed enterprise IT, allowing for more agility, flexibility and scalability, and creating new business and technology opportunities. It has, however, also placed incremental burden on IT teams.

The role of the IT department was once manageable — straightforward tasks such as computer desktop support, installing and configuring hardware and software, and monitoring and maintaining systems and servers were commonplace. But as a result of digital transformation and the adoption of new and emerging technologies, IT teams are now responsible for driving business strategy and cost savings. With all of the new responsibilities, it's not surprising that we've seen new disciplines emerge, such as NetOps, DevOps, SecOps and DevSecOps.

At the same time, as the point-person for overseeing IT teams, the role of the CIO has expanded — now leading everything from the adoption of new technology stacks to the management of customer experience. In a world where every customer engagement point can make or break brand loyalty, it's more important than ever for CIOs to adopt a digital-first strategy. This includes implementing the right processes, procedures and technologies that ensure optimal performance of networks and applications.

Networks and applications drive the efficiency of business processes and the experience of customers, and subsequently, they drive revenue and profitability for organizations. But, according to IDG, over 75% of IT organizations still suffer from degraded business applications.

Network and Application Performance Management (NAPM) technology provides visibility into performance issues, empowering CIOs and IT teams with the ability to quickly identify and resolve problems before they impact the end user experience. According to a recent study from Accedian and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), the technology also offers many business and economic benefits to IT teams far beyond its role in performance, with huge boosts to the overall economy, but with an immediate impact on an organization's employee productivity.

The Impacts of NAPM Investment

It's common for many IT teams to focus on a specific scope of responsibility – whether it's the network, systems, cloud, application or database. NAPM technology provides teams with end-to-end performance visibility, proactively delivering actionable insights to detect and fix issues impacting business productivity.

In fact, when NAPM technology is deployed, Accedian's research found there was an economy-wide increase in productivity among IT workers (as much as a 7.7% boost in productivity), which translates to more than $18.9 billion added to the U.S. economy by 2024. To put this into perspective, that's over 50% of the entire economy of the state of Vermont. If anything, these figures are conservative, as this study was carried out pre-COVID-19 when workers were not as reliant on the network.

When looking at industry-specific data, IT, telecoms and communications services experience the greatest benefits from NAPM technology. Across this sector, IT worker productivity contributes $13.3 billion of value to the general economy. And even beyond this increase, NAPM in the sector contributes a further $1.5 billion in reduced network downtime — meaning the financial consequences associated with network outages are significantly mitigated. But that's not to say this is the only industry where NAPM offers big benefits. A boost in IT productivity in the finance and insurance industries, for example, contributes $4.2 billion of total economic general value add. Retail comes in with a comparatively small boost of $200 million, but with high competition among retailers who are increasingly relying on online revenue, this number is still significant.

Productivity isn't the only benefit that the research found from NAPM technology adoption. The benefits cascade across entire industries, greatly affecting cybersecurity and uplifting the overall economy. The study found a massive reduction in data breach-related fines by as much as $157 million by 2024. Overall, it has the potential to add as much as $32.7 billion to the overall U.S. economy by 2024, representing a 0.13% increase in forecasted GDP.

Your Network and the New Normal

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how important network and application performance really is, as we are now reliant on it for everything from work to school to shopping for everyday necessities. This makes network uptime all the more necessary. CIOs and IT teams must understand the true importance of network performance and rise to the occasion, taking the network into consideration when configuring organizational technology stacks.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

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NAPM Investment: Why the Value Extends Far Beyond the Network

Sergio Bea
Accedian

Over the last decade, the public cloud has completely transformed enterprise IT, allowing for more agility, flexibility and scalability, and creating new business and technology opportunities. It has, however, also placed incremental burden on IT teams.

The role of the IT department was once manageable — straightforward tasks such as computer desktop support, installing and configuring hardware and software, and monitoring and maintaining systems and servers were commonplace. But as a result of digital transformation and the adoption of new and emerging technologies, IT teams are now responsible for driving business strategy and cost savings. With all of the new responsibilities, it's not surprising that we've seen new disciplines emerge, such as NetOps, DevOps, SecOps and DevSecOps.

At the same time, as the point-person for overseeing IT teams, the role of the CIO has expanded — now leading everything from the adoption of new technology stacks to the management of customer experience. In a world where every customer engagement point can make or break brand loyalty, it's more important than ever for CIOs to adopt a digital-first strategy. This includes implementing the right processes, procedures and technologies that ensure optimal performance of networks and applications.

Networks and applications drive the efficiency of business processes and the experience of customers, and subsequently, they drive revenue and profitability for organizations. But, according to IDG, over 75% of IT organizations still suffer from degraded business applications.

Network and Application Performance Management (NAPM) technology provides visibility into performance issues, empowering CIOs and IT teams with the ability to quickly identify and resolve problems before they impact the end user experience. According to a recent study from Accedian and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), the technology also offers many business and economic benefits to IT teams far beyond its role in performance, with huge boosts to the overall economy, but with an immediate impact on an organization's employee productivity.

The Impacts of NAPM Investment

It's common for many IT teams to focus on a specific scope of responsibility – whether it's the network, systems, cloud, application or database. NAPM technology provides teams with end-to-end performance visibility, proactively delivering actionable insights to detect and fix issues impacting business productivity.

In fact, when NAPM technology is deployed, Accedian's research found there was an economy-wide increase in productivity among IT workers (as much as a 7.7% boost in productivity), which translates to more than $18.9 billion added to the U.S. economy by 2024. To put this into perspective, that's over 50% of the entire economy of the state of Vermont. If anything, these figures are conservative, as this study was carried out pre-COVID-19 when workers were not as reliant on the network.

When looking at industry-specific data, IT, telecoms and communications services experience the greatest benefits from NAPM technology. Across this sector, IT worker productivity contributes $13.3 billion of value to the general economy. And even beyond this increase, NAPM in the sector contributes a further $1.5 billion in reduced network downtime — meaning the financial consequences associated with network outages are significantly mitigated. But that's not to say this is the only industry where NAPM offers big benefits. A boost in IT productivity in the finance and insurance industries, for example, contributes $4.2 billion of total economic general value add. Retail comes in with a comparatively small boost of $200 million, but with high competition among retailers who are increasingly relying on online revenue, this number is still significant.

Productivity isn't the only benefit that the research found from NAPM technology adoption. The benefits cascade across entire industries, greatly affecting cybersecurity and uplifting the overall economy. The study found a massive reduction in data breach-related fines by as much as $157 million by 2024. Overall, it has the potential to add as much as $32.7 billion to the overall U.S. economy by 2024, representing a 0.13% increase in forecasted GDP.

Your Network and the New Normal

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how important network and application performance really is, as we are now reliant on it for everything from work to school to shopping for everyday necessities. This makes network uptime all the more necessary. CIOs and IT teams must understand the true importance of network performance and rise to the occasion, taking the network into consideration when configuring organizational technology stacks.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...