Flying Blind in the Face of Remote Business Edge Complexity

The need for observability to mitigate customer impact and business risk

Co-workers discussing issue at a desk
NETSCOUT

Distance may make the heart grow fonder in relationships, but it doesn’t do a heck of a lot for the hearts of IT personnel when it comes to maintaining critical tools at the business edge—such as unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems at remote site locations. The complexity of today’s modern infrastructure creates significant challenges for IT, which is tasked with assuring the performance and security of systems and applications.

Without the ability to continuously monitor the entire ecosystem, IT can find itself completely in the dark trying to identify the source of problems, which could very well be originating in any of a number of different locations or across multiple vendors. As a result, user experience, business continuity, and productivity are all at risk.

NETSCOUT’s annual UCaaS Survey found that “76 percent of IT teams take from a few hours to as much as a week to resolve UCaaS issues in central offices, while 71 percent indicated it takes the same amount of time to resolve SaaS-related issues [see Figure 1]. Simply put, remote sites present greater challenges when it comes to resolving issues for obvious reasons.” What is needed is visibility all the way to the business edge, providing an extensive level of observability out to remote office locations. This is essential for empowering IT to address disruptions quickly.

Chart depicting time to resolve UCaaS, SaaS, and trouble tickets for remote locations

Figure 1: Time to resolution of UCaaS and SaaS-related issues and trouble tickets for remote locations

Growing Reliance on Remote Sites Compounds Network Performance Challenges for IT

As more and more businesses today rely on widely dispersed personnel, the need for reliable connectivity with remote sites is crucial. The UCaaS Survey found that 55 percent of enterprise organizations support 26 or more remote sites. These sites vary in nature. According to the survey, 60 percent were for regional branch offices, while 59 percent were distribution centers/warehouses, 55 percent were retail locations, 41 percent were satellite campuses, 39 percent were factories, 24 percent were medical offices, and 24 percent were government offices.

As is often the case with remote sites, IT resources are limited on-site, making it more challenging to monitor network and application performance. And because traffic is no longer strictly relegated to a data center, it may now travel through the internet, cloud platforms, and virtual data centers when reaching remote offices. Troubleshooting the network and vital applications is compounded by the remote nature of today’s work dynamic.

IT is under increasing pressure to ensure that network and application performance is up to snuff and availability is optimized. Failure to do so can result in poor user experiences, productivity loss, frustrated employees, and negative impacts on the bottom line.

What IT needs is vendor-independent observability across the entire communications ecosystem.

The Need for Visibility at the Edge

Visibility at the edge is key for measuring the impact of secure access service edge (SASE) technology and SaaS application performance, over either Ethernet or Wi-Fi connectivity, which can be observed only at remote sites. A lack of visibility ultimately leads to a lengthy war-room process where everyone ends up pointing fingers at each other because it is difficult to determine ownership of the problem.

This lack of observability means IT simply doesn’t have sufficient quality data to pinpoint problems accurately or quickly. Teams end up being reactive, rather than proactive, detecting problems only after users complain. Without a consistent, unified view across the business, IT can struggle to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). This struggle is only amplified in highly distributed businesses.

The Secret to Remote Observability Is Deep Packet Inspection at Scale

The secret to effective remote-site observability is deep packet inspection (DPI). NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution delivers pervasive visibility by leveraging DPI at scale, which means instruments are placed at all points throughout the infrastructure—all the way to the business edge. NETSCOUT is able to provide DPI no matter where workloads are or where users work. This powerful solution scales to meet the needs of the enterprise, whether it involves one data center or thousands of data centers, offices, user locations, colocations, and multiple clouds. The architecture of this solution is unique within the industry because it is able to handle any complexity and size—both geographically and in terms of volume.

The NETSCOUT solution also handles the challenges of packet analysis, distilling the vast amounts of packet data into meaningful categories of metadata in real time, also known as Smart Data, which can then be used for targeted, higher-level analysis. The versatility of this monitoring approach is that it continuously derives metrics that indicate what’s going on in the network, how apps are performing, or whether there’s a security breach.

The nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution delivers actionable and scalable real-time visibility of the digital experience for all users and applications. In this way, it allows IT teams to be proactive in problem detection, isolation, and resolution—empowering them to make better decisions and solve problems faster.

To learn more about remote-site observability, watch our webinar