Engineering a high-performance digital enterprise

October 27 2020
 

Adopting an integrated, unified approach to IT environment management can pay huge dividends for digitally transformed enterprises.


Back in the 1960s, French automaker Citroën pioneered the first “adaptive” headlights for automobiles. The quad-headlight system featured an inner pair of lights that swiveled with the front wheels, making it the first car to “see” around corners. Decades later, all leading automakers around the world have created their own advanced nighttime vision and hazard identification systems to make driving safer and more enjoyable. 

What automakers have historically and instinctively understood is that in order to navigate and negate potential threats to safety on the road to a destination, they have to first be visible. And in a completely different realm, technology and business leaders are now coming to the same conclusion.

Today’s IT environment includes exponentially more “potholes” — endpoints to configure, an array of public and private clouds to optimize, and a never-ending parade of cloud-based apps to monitor and secure — than at any time in history. The average enterprise uses nearly 1,300 cloud-based services and a healthy mix of public and private clouds from various providers. 

Like their automaker counterparts, enterprise leaders are also realizing that their old-fashioned headlights — their conventional application and network monitoring solutions — aren’t well equipped for today’s dark and winding business road. Every new app, system, or cloud connection is another potential blindspot in which disaster can strike without warning. 

A breach here or an outage there can wreak havoc on an organization’s operations, customer confidence, and the bottom line. That’s why today’s business leaders need to evolve conventional application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring (NPM) to create a translation layer — a Digital Experience Management (DEM) platform — that marries the most critical and valuable elements of application and network monitoring to provide complete, end-to-end visibility across the entire enterprise footprint for maximum agility, security, and control. 

More apps, more clouds, more invisible threats

One of the biggest threats to enterprise IT is the modernization of the function itself. In the past, an IT environment consisted mostly of whatever was housed within the four walls of a data center and required little more than setting up servers, troubleshooting a terminal, or configuring new software for a team or department.

That’s no longer the case, as more than 80% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud this year and spending on cloud application services — Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) — is expected to grow by a combined total of nearly 35% over the next two years.

As apps and services continue to move out of private or small co-located data centers and into a network of distributed data centers and clouds — and as more companies transition to remote workforces due to COVID or previously designed long-term plans — enterprise executives need to find ways to unify their monitoring and remediation efforts to deliver seamless digital experiences for global workers and customers alike.

“Real-time information gives us the ability to focus on today’s problem. Not yesterday’s problem. By differentiating between the two, we can prevent tomorrow’s problem.”
Heather Fry, Director of Product Development, Paychex

Rather than continuing to rely on point solutions that operate in silos and create visibility gaps between core- and mission-critical systems or applications, they should emphasize the goal of achieving self-driving networks and IT environments that provide:

  • Timely insights and real-time visibility into the farthest reaches of the organization
  • Comprehensive automation to minimize manual efforts and reduce blindspots human teams can’t cover
  • Detection, troubleshooting, automatic remediation for network performance and security incidents

 

Yet, it’s not enough to just manage and report on systems and apps within the enterprise footprint. Modern visibility and monitoring solutions also need insight into numerous third-party networks and services that are outside of IT’s control, and account for new, unpredictable variables introduced by remote work like weak internet connections, security interoperability, and cross-solution workflows.

DEM is the HOV lane to success

Enterprises that embrace Digital Experience Management solutions to unify application and network management operations can gain deeper insights into their daily operations, improve overall performance and availability, and drive greater productivity, customer engagement, and profitability.

Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions combine traditional monitoring systems into a cohesive, integrated platform for unprecedented visibility across all customer and employee digital experiences and touchpoints. Specifically, DEM platforms tailored to meeting business demands in the Digital Age should provide wide-ranging visibility and monitoring capabilities like:

 

Adopting an integrated, unified approach to IT environment management can pay huge dividends for digitally transformed enterprises. In particular, organizations embracing DEM platforms can benefit greatly from:

  • Real-time performance information across every app- or network-related issue in a complex digital service delivery supply chain
  • Cross-platform visibility that helps avoid chaotic war rooms and dreaded finger-pointing while accelerating time-to-resolution
  • Reduced risk of breach and failing compliance through proactive threats scanning, security patching, and detailed digital audit trail for true transparency

 

The digital enterprise is no longer just a reliable, boring family sedan — it’s a high-performance, complex machine. Like fancy cars, today’s business can’t rely on outdated safety and performance features. Instead, they need to properly equip their business vehicle with solutions that provide the widespread visibility and rich intelligence to help them safely navigate obstacles in the road to success and put them on a clear path to sustainable growth.

To learn more about transforming your IT capabilities with Digital Experience Management solutions, download The Ultimate Guide to Network & Application Visibility.

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