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Do You Know What Network Brownouts Are Costing You, and What You Need to Do About It?

Sergio Bea
Accedian

COVID-19 has changed a great deal this year about the way we live and work. Some things, like mass remote working and surging e-commerce sales, will long outlast the pandemic. But this creates a challenge. As businesses increasingly come to rely on high-speed, high performance networks, and the applications that run on top, what happens when brownouts occur?

The past year was all about survival. Now it's time to thrive. That means a renewed focus on network and application performance management to spur the next stage of growth, as we move out of the shadow of the pandemic.


Going Digital

Global business was already transforming digitally well before COVID-19 struck, although in some industries at a faster rate than others. Retail had become an increasingly competitive vertical, with brands under intense pressure to deliver seamless personalized experiences across multiple channels. In fact, the growing influence on online retail and direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club may have hastened the demise of many bricks and mortar stores including Payless ShoeSource, Gymboree and Charlotte Russe.

COVID-19 has accelerated the push to all things digital. Businesses that used to talk about digital strategy in "one- to three-year phases" must now scale-up in just days or weeks, according to McKinsey. A major part of this is about supporting the newly distributed workforce. In April, over half (51%) of Americans said they "always" work remotely.

Under Pressure

Unfortunately, network infrastructure has in many cases been unable to support these surging demands. A poll of over 1,000 IT decision makers in the US we conducted recently revealed that over 40% suffer network brownouts several times a week, while end user complaints about application performance soared by 60% due to performance degradations, excessive slowdowns and network congestion.

Nearly a third (30%) reported problems with SaaS applications like Office 365 and team collaboration tools, which have become a vital means to maintain employee productivity amidst mass remote working. Fast, uninterrupted access to such applications is not only essential, but also expected by home workers today. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. Respondents also highlighted problems with the performance of business-critical databases, streaming services that support webinars and online events, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), ERP and finance systems, and customer communication channels.

This is not only a barrier to employee but specifically to IT worker productivity. A fifth of organizations experience brownouts on a daily basis, and more than half spending an average of 2.5 hours resolving a single incident. For many, that means as much as 12.5 hours each week is wasted on network troubleshooting. This is also an issue that goes beyond staff productivity to the very heart of business performance. If you can't access and use critical databases, IT infrastructure in the public cloud and enterprise software, or interact with customers in a timely manner, everything starts to fall apart.

What's the Problem?

Nearly half (47%) of the organizations we polled blame network connectivity providers for these brownouts, as well as maintenance and upgrades (43%) and unexpected traffic increases (43%). A broader problem is that IT and network teams simply don't have visibility into performance. We found that over a quarter of network brownouts are not even discovered by IT or NetOps, but are instead found and reported by users or customers. That means problems aren't being addressed early on, before they can escalate. They have already become acute enough that end users are starting to notice.

That's bad news not only for staff productivity and satisfaction, but also your brand reputation. Both can have a serious knock-on effect on the bottom line. So where should IT and NetOps leaders turn?

Getting Proactive

Active monitoring can certainly help to resolve the top three issues highlighted by IT leaders as causing brownouts. It means that you're proactively monitoring service quality rather than waiting for others to inform you when performance degradations get out of hand. By getting hold of independent performance data, organizations can enforce the relevant SLAs with their broadband provider and ensure they're getting the bandwidth they're paying for. Also consider running service activation tests and high-definition network testing after any upgrade or changes, to further minimize the chances of disruption down the line.

Any third-party technology suppliers serving your organization must also have access to the right tools to anticipate and tackle brownouts.

As we emerge from COVID-19, life for many of us will return to a pre-pandemic normal. But in many other ways it will be forever changed — 72% of office workers want to work remotely going forward, for example. This will require a closer focus on performance management, to ensure your IT and network services are ready for a new cloud- and digital-first era.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Do You Know What Network Brownouts Are Costing You, and What You Need to Do About It?

Sergio Bea
Accedian

COVID-19 has changed a great deal this year about the way we live and work. Some things, like mass remote working and surging e-commerce sales, will long outlast the pandemic. But this creates a challenge. As businesses increasingly come to rely on high-speed, high performance networks, and the applications that run on top, what happens when brownouts occur?

The past year was all about survival. Now it's time to thrive. That means a renewed focus on network and application performance management to spur the next stage of growth, as we move out of the shadow of the pandemic.


Going Digital

Global business was already transforming digitally well before COVID-19 struck, although in some industries at a faster rate than others. Retail had become an increasingly competitive vertical, with brands under intense pressure to deliver seamless personalized experiences across multiple channels. In fact, the growing influence on online retail and direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club may have hastened the demise of many bricks and mortar stores including Payless ShoeSource, Gymboree and Charlotte Russe.

COVID-19 has accelerated the push to all things digital. Businesses that used to talk about digital strategy in "one- to three-year phases" must now scale-up in just days or weeks, according to McKinsey. A major part of this is about supporting the newly distributed workforce. In April, over half (51%) of Americans said they "always" work remotely.

Under Pressure

Unfortunately, network infrastructure has in many cases been unable to support these surging demands. A poll of over 1,000 IT decision makers in the US we conducted recently revealed that over 40% suffer network brownouts several times a week, while end user complaints about application performance soared by 60% due to performance degradations, excessive slowdowns and network congestion.

Nearly a third (30%) reported problems with SaaS applications like Office 365 and team collaboration tools, which have become a vital means to maintain employee productivity amidst mass remote working. Fast, uninterrupted access to such applications is not only essential, but also expected by home workers today. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. Respondents also highlighted problems with the performance of business-critical databases, streaming services that support webinars and online events, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), ERP and finance systems, and customer communication channels.

This is not only a barrier to employee but specifically to IT worker productivity. A fifth of organizations experience brownouts on a daily basis, and more than half spending an average of 2.5 hours resolving a single incident. For many, that means as much as 12.5 hours each week is wasted on network troubleshooting. This is also an issue that goes beyond staff productivity to the very heart of business performance. If you can't access and use critical databases, IT infrastructure in the public cloud and enterprise software, or interact with customers in a timely manner, everything starts to fall apart.

What's the Problem?

Nearly half (47%) of the organizations we polled blame network connectivity providers for these brownouts, as well as maintenance and upgrades (43%) and unexpected traffic increases (43%). A broader problem is that IT and network teams simply don't have visibility into performance. We found that over a quarter of network brownouts are not even discovered by IT or NetOps, but are instead found and reported by users or customers. That means problems aren't being addressed early on, before they can escalate. They have already become acute enough that end users are starting to notice.

That's bad news not only for staff productivity and satisfaction, but also your brand reputation. Both can have a serious knock-on effect on the bottom line. So where should IT and NetOps leaders turn?

Getting Proactive

Active monitoring can certainly help to resolve the top three issues highlighted by IT leaders as causing brownouts. It means that you're proactively monitoring service quality rather than waiting for others to inform you when performance degradations get out of hand. By getting hold of independent performance data, organizations can enforce the relevant SLAs with their broadband provider and ensure they're getting the bandwidth they're paying for. Also consider running service activation tests and high-definition network testing after any upgrade or changes, to further minimize the chances of disruption down the line.

Any third-party technology suppliers serving your organization must also have access to the right tools to anticipate and tackle brownouts.

As we emerge from COVID-19, life for many of us will return to a pre-pandemic normal. But in many other ways it will be forever changed — 72% of office workers want to work remotely going forward, for example. This will require a closer focus on performance management, to ensure your IT and network services are ready for a new cloud- and digital-first era.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

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 ...