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Turning Tactical IT Into Strategic IT

Keith Bromley

As businesses look to drive more and more value out of the organization, is there a way that IT can help? While the answer could be yes, the problem is time.

Around 41% of enterprise IT departments spend over 50% of their time responding to network and application performance problems

A study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates showed that around 41% of enterprise IT departments spend over 50% of their time responding to network and application performance problems. This leaves precious little time for value-add activities.

While tactical IT activities are necessary, they place a considerable drain on IT resources. What if you could reduce the amount of problem resolution time by just 10%? This would be more time that could be applied to deliver projects that increase customer retention, expand market share, and/or increase revenue. Again, while there is definitely value for tactical IT activities, the value is smaller than the value of strategic IT activities.

The question then becomes, how can you reduce the time you spend on application and network activities so that you can redeploy that time for strategic business tasks?

The answer is to improve your visibility into the network. Organizations need access to data. At the same time, that data is overloading them. According to IBM research, over 90% of all of the data in the world has been created in the last two years. Network visibility allows you to capture and process key pieces of network and application data to: generate business insights for better network and application performance, perform macroscopic troubleshooting tactics, create better security device efficiencies, and implement better compliance practices.

A lack of network visibility (geolocation of users and problems, device type and browser type information, real-time access to network and application performance as it transits across the network, etc.) is behind a lot of IT inefficiency. This results in a longer amount of time to put out troubleshooting fires than was necessary. Flow data, packet data, and performance data can all be combined to quickly create a detailed analysis. With this extra information, you can be more strategic and plan more effectively.

85% of MTTR is the time taken to identify that there is, in fact, an issue

Increased network visibility is also critical when dealing with one of the top IT metrics, mean time to repair (MTTR). Approximately 85% of MTTR is the time taken to identify that there is, in fact, an issue, says Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.

Even worse, Kerravala says, the MTTR clock starts ticking whether IT knows that there is an issue or not. Reducing this metric not only helps to give you back valuable time, it should help you improve one of your key performance indicators (KPI).

Network visibility can assist in all of these areas. The foundation of network visibility is the visibility architecture. This architecture consists of three element types: taps, network packet brokers, and monitoring tools. Taps are simply passive devices that make a complete copy of the data traversing the network on that particular network segment. The copied data is then sent to a packet broker which allows you to aggregate all of your data, deduplicate it, strip off unnecessary headers or payloads, and then replicate one or more pieces of that data and send it to different monitoring tools. Once the visibility architecture is in place, reductions of MTTR by up to 80% are possible.

Some of the biggest enterprise changes today are cloud computing, shadow IT, and mobile/bring-your-own-device (BYOD). The thread that links these shifts is data handling. Each one, in different ways, enables users to create data from new sources. Network visibility should be a critical component of this shift to reduce your time and money spent on tactical IT activities.

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Turning Tactical IT Into Strategic IT

Keith Bromley

As businesses look to drive more and more value out of the organization, is there a way that IT can help? While the answer could be yes, the problem is time.

Around 41% of enterprise IT departments spend over 50% of their time responding to network and application performance problems

A study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates showed that around 41% of enterprise IT departments spend over 50% of their time responding to network and application performance problems. This leaves precious little time for value-add activities.

While tactical IT activities are necessary, they place a considerable drain on IT resources. What if you could reduce the amount of problem resolution time by just 10%? This would be more time that could be applied to deliver projects that increase customer retention, expand market share, and/or increase revenue. Again, while there is definitely value for tactical IT activities, the value is smaller than the value of strategic IT activities.

The question then becomes, how can you reduce the time you spend on application and network activities so that you can redeploy that time for strategic business tasks?

The answer is to improve your visibility into the network. Organizations need access to data. At the same time, that data is overloading them. According to IBM research, over 90% of all of the data in the world has been created in the last two years. Network visibility allows you to capture and process key pieces of network and application data to: generate business insights for better network and application performance, perform macroscopic troubleshooting tactics, create better security device efficiencies, and implement better compliance practices.

A lack of network visibility (geolocation of users and problems, device type and browser type information, real-time access to network and application performance as it transits across the network, etc.) is behind a lot of IT inefficiency. This results in a longer amount of time to put out troubleshooting fires than was necessary. Flow data, packet data, and performance data can all be combined to quickly create a detailed analysis. With this extra information, you can be more strategic and plan more effectively.

85% of MTTR is the time taken to identify that there is, in fact, an issue

Increased network visibility is also critical when dealing with one of the top IT metrics, mean time to repair (MTTR). Approximately 85% of MTTR is the time taken to identify that there is, in fact, an issue, says Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.

Even worse, Kerravala says, the MTTR clock starts ticking whether IT knows that there is an issue or not. Reducing this metric not only helps to give you back valuable time, it should help you improve one of your key performance indicators (KPI).

Network visibility can assist in all of these areas. The foundation of network visibility is the visibility architecture. This architecture consists of three element types: taps, network packet brokers, and monitoring tools. Taps are simply passive devices that make a complete copy of the data traversing the network on that particular network segment. The copied data is then sent to a packet broker which allows you to aggregate all of your data, deduplicate it, strip off unnecessary headers or payloads, and then replicate one or more pieces of that data and send it to different monitoring tools. Once the visibility architecture is in place, reductions of MTTR by up to 80% are possible.

Some of the biggest enterprise changes today are cloud computing, shadow IT, and mobile/bring-your-own-device (BYOD). The thread that links these shifts is data handling. Each one, in different ways, enables users to create data from new sources. Network visibility should be a critical component of this shift to reduce your time and money spent on tactical IT activities.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...