Anybody who has ever torn a ligament knows just how important connective tissue is. As it turns out, the same also applies to Digital Transformation (DX). According to a recent article from Information Management, companies are investing in big data, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and Internet of Things (IoT) technology as part of their Digital Transformation strategy. But a follow-up survey entitled, “Industrial Internet of Things and Digital Transformation” turns up something interesting: many of the respondents struggled to successfully connect these investments across their disparate IT environments. For example, when the Internet of Things Institute (IoTI) took a look at the second survey, it noted that many respondents had trouble getting industrial IoT data into transactional and analytics systems. According to IoTI, “Only 16% of the 200 manufacturing and contracting executives surveyed said they consumed IoT data in ERP systems.”
The problem is twofold. In some cases, companies bring IoT workloads in from the edge to integrate into the ERP system. In other cases, compute and processing is done at the edge and data is then aggregated in the cloud for analysis. Either way, the enterprise benefits from ERP, IoT, and cloud technology when everything works. However, poor service performance can put those benefits at risk. In a digital world where customer success comes down to seconds or a fraction of a second, pervasive visibility and insight to assure service performance can make or break the business.
The issues turned up by these surveys highlight what various IT analysts have long espoused: Enterprises are being driven to transform digitally, yet they face network and application performance challenges when moving applications like ERP to the cloud and adding IoT edge devices to the infrastructure. Shifting to a proactive approach to Digital Transformation requires pervasive visibility to first understand the way the application works before, during, and after cloud migration; and from there, to get insight across the entire IoT service delivery stack. When this happens, enterprises then reduce business risk and also have the confidence to innovate.
Armed with understanding the complexities and performance of applications in IoT and cloud environments, IT will have the confidence to facilitate change by delivering the services and security that the business expects while controlling costs. Learn more about successful cloud adoption by downloading this Cloud Migration Strategies report by ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group).
~ Ron Lifton, Sr Solutions Marketing Manager, NETSCOUT