#8 - "The challenges of delivery unique services in the Application Economy”
I've got teenage girls and they obviously are always on their phones. Between Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and tons of other apps I’m sure I don't even know the names of – that’s a lot of communication services they choose to use to stay in touch with their friends.
In the application economy, everyone is in the software business as well. You have to differentiate yourself from the competition through applications. 50% of companies surveyed say their industry has been highly disrupted by the application economy and 44% are already experiencing this impact within their own organization.
This basically means more applications on the network, creating more demands for bandwidth, becoming highly sensitive to latency, demanding availability, and creating an instant need to be triaged if there is a problem.
To succeed in the application economy, you have to embark on a fundamental transformation to remain relevant and competitive. The network is a big part of that transformation. Modern network technologies like software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined data centers (SDDC) and software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) are being adopted to assure relevancy and competitive advantage for the business.
The vendor landscape to choose from for your modern network technology transformation can have you scratching your head as well. Do you go with Open Source, Cisco, VMware, Viptela or a combination of more than one? Recent research from Enterprise Management Associates revealed that most companies plan to deploy more than one technology stack to support modernization of their networks.
When adopting modern network architectures like cloud and SDN that are deployed on more than one vendor stack, you need to make sure your avoiding some common monitoring and management pitfalls.
- Don’t build another monitoring silo just to spend more money in the end to try to unify and integrate all your solutions. Especially from one technology vendor that helps you quickly fill a gap. Vendor lock in and integration problems could mean a solution that is not applicable to the network operations and engineering teams.
- Don’t be forced to abandon your Operational User Interface (UI). The Operational UI is the features, functions and disciplines that you have adapted into your company’s workflow and you should not abandon this just because you plan to entertain a new network monitoring solution that won’t support your current processes ingrained into your network operation teams. You should expect to maintain the same operational UI and workflows and apply them to the new modern network technology areas you plan to deploy.
- Don’t forget about scale. Today’s modern network architectures demand you think about how you plan to manage and monitor the explosion of objects on your network introduced by SDN and IoT. The new virtual and logical network components introduced by these technologies are equivalent to another interface or device you have to monitor.
A comprehensive and integrated network performance monitoring approach is essential to avoiding these pitfalls while guaranteeing that when you deploy modern network technologies from multiple vendors, you can still have one operational UI that spans all technology stacks while enabling visibility from your legacy network, through your software-defined architectures and along the path out the cloud.
CA Technologies has launched a new network performance monitoring comic series featuring Kip and Gary to bring a little fun and laughter to the everyday challenges network operations teams face with traditional network performance monitoring along with implementing and managing modern network architectures like SDN.
Check it out here and vote for your favorite!
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read all the blogs in our 8-week comic series on Modern Network Performance Monitoring. I really hope you were able to get some laughs from these to brighten your day!