A lack of network visibility (i.e., ability to capture, record, search and visualize network traffic) negatively impacts the ability of IT staff to identify and resolve critical application performance issues, leading to substantial losses in business productivity and revenue, according to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Emulex.
The study entitled Improving Incident Response: Building a More Efficient IT Infrastructure was based on a survey of 158 IT organizations with more than 1,000 employees in North America with direct responsibility for business-critical applications.
The study analyzed the current state of application availability and performance, the consequences of limited availability and performance issues, and the desire for an ideal service management automation solution.
The survey that was conducted as a part of the study revealed that network performance and network security have a direct effect on application Quality of Service (QoS), and that the increasing complexity of enterprise networks has been impacting the ability of IT organizations to maintain QoS levels.
Despite continued corporate IT investment hiring/training the best people and providing them with tools, the challenge of providing secure and highly available enterprise networks continues to increase because network operations (NetOps) and security operations (SecOps) staff often do not have the data they need to resolve critical issues.
Network visibility was identified as a critical strategy to address this issue, and to improve workforce productivity and cost management related to the identification and resolution of network and security issues in the data center.
The Forrester study focused on the key challenges facing enterprise IT staff in the face of such trends as the arrival of public/private/hybrid cloud computing, server/network virtualization, and software-as-a-service applications. While these trends are without question enabling enterprises to conduct more transactions per dollar and per second, they also can hide the factors impacting network performance and security, and hence impact the ability of IT staff to resolve these issues.
One of the key findings of the study that illustrates this was that 56 percent of the IT operations staff can resolve less than 75 percent of their performance and availability issues in 24 hours.
The importance of addressing this situation was illustrated by three conclusions from the study:
- Performance of business services and their underlying applications and transactions are affected by the network, not only to improve or maintain productivity, but also as a way to contain costs.
- As business initiatives add complexity to an already complex series of business services, networks grow in importance relative to the overall infrastructure, not only as the backbone supporting client interactions, but also as the highway between all aggregated applications that constitute a business service.
- Business productivity and IT productivity are greatly dependent upon each other.
Recent catastrophic breaches in the retail sector and network issues in the banking sector highlight the negative impact that such network issues can have, not only on the bottom line of organizations, but also on customer loyalty and an organization’s brand.
One of the key recommendations of this study was that a disciplined approach to incident response, including end-to-end visibility of network infrastructure, is critical to resolving incidents like these more effectively and to reducing the disruption such incidents has on enterprises, the IT staff of those enterprises, and on their customers.
Mike Heumann is Sr. Director, Marketing (Endace) for Emulex.
Related Links:
The Latest
A long-running study of DevOps practices ... suggests that any historical gains in MTTR reduction have now plateaued. For years now, the time it takes to restore services has stayed about the same: less than a day for high performers but up to a week for middle-tier teams and up to a month for laggards. The fact that progress is flat despite big investments in people, tools and automation is a cause for concern ...
Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds ...
Customer loyalty is changing as retailers get increasingly competitive. More than 75% of consumers say they would end business with a company after a single bad customer experience. This means that just one price discrepancy, inventory mishap or checkout issue in a physical or digital store, could have customers running out to the next store that can provide them with better service. Retailers must be able to predict business outages in advance, and act proactively before an incident occurs, impacting customer experience ...
Earlier this year, New Relic conducted a study on observability ... The 2023 Observability Forecast reveals observability's impact on the lives of technical professionals and businesses' bottom lines. Here are 10 key takeaways from the forecast ...
Only 33% of executives are "very confident" in their ability to operate in a public cloud environment, according to the 2023 State of CloudOps report from NetApp. This represents an increase from 2022 when only 21% reported feeling very confident ...
The majority of organizations across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) breached over the last year had personally identifiable information (PII) compromised, but most have not yet modified their data management policies, according to the Cybersecurity and PII Report from ManageEngine ...
A large majority of organizations employ more than one cloud automation solution, and this practice creates significant challenges that are resulting in delays and added costs for businesses, according to Why companies lose efficiency and compliance with cloud automation solutions from Broadcom ...