Mobile Workers Need Service Assurance to Get Things Done

In an online survey conducted a year ago by Zogby Analytics around 60% of millennials (18 to 34 year olds) said that within the next five years everything will be done on mobile devices.  Considering millennials make up around one-third of the workforce, they are having a profound impact on the connected world. Add to this that in the past 30 years highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs grew by 100%, then it’s easy to understand how Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) employees are driving an increase in traffic volumes and use of consumer applications across the enterprise infrastructure. When it comes to work, according to the Internet Trend 2015 report from Mary Meeker, almost half of the millennials use smartphones, 40% download mobile applications to do their job, and more than a third collaborate online.  At the same time these users expect an outstanding quality of experience anywhere, anytime and for any application.  But multi-screen convenience, efficiency and productivity means increased IT complexity with consumer applications on the corporate network and the addition of BYOD technologies.

The line between personal and professional connectivity is fast becoming nonexistent. Pervasively connected workers get more done with devices they control and are comfortable with, affecting the corporate environment in a number of ways. Additionally, applications have longer reach, enabled by mobile devices that both bring work home and personal life into the workplace.  Mobile growth requires a scalable infrastructure to handle bandwidth intensive applications and IT solutions that include Mobile Device Management (MDM), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and virtualized applications.  These solutions have transformed the business work environment with opportunities for agile and flexible modes of working. Employees choose the right device for the right job, at the right time, in the right place.

Yet, the consumerization of IT means new demands are placed on the corporate network and more things can go wrong with service delivery. The problem source can be anywhere along the service delivery path including L2/L3 load-balancers, virtual servers, middleware, databases, and service enablers including DHCP and LDAP. Service performance issues impacting users can be due to changes to Quality-of-Service (QoS), firewall rules, and access control lists.

IT teams can’t face the challenges of service delivery with traditional silo-specific tools simply because they miss the big picture. Most large enterprises use more than10 different performance monitoring and availability tools.  When service degradations impact users or customers and effective service triage and root-cause analysis are critical, these tools with disparate data sets become an IT organization distraction not a solution. According to a recent Forrester Consulting report, there is a lack of data sharing and collaboration between IT teams.  As a result, few performance issues are resolved quickly, and many persist for extended periods lasting more than 24 hours and costing organizations millions of dollars per year.

Technology transformations like VDI, software defined data centers, hybrid cloud, and Unified Communications, require a platform to accelerate migration to virtualized infrastructures, with confidence and without compromising end user or customer experience, and save money in the process.  A platform with pervasive instrumentation and traffic-based intelligence can provide a complete understanding of the business service experience and quickly identify the source of a performance problem including a malfunctioning service enabler like Active Directory preventing email access; DSCP mismatch that clobbers voice communications; a virtual desktop issue causing an application to freeze; or a user community impacted by an issue related to application tiers residing on different virtual machines (VMs) and on different hypervisors.

For effective service triage and situational awareness, IT teams require full visibility into layers 2 through 7 as well as much needed insight into service delivery interrelationships and dependencies.  As TechValidate, the premier “voice of the customer” research firm, discovered in a recent survey, traffic-based intelligence delivers extraordinary ROI benefits by bringing service performance clarity to even the most complicated IT environment.  Gaining deep and real-time insight into network and service performance across virtual, physical and hybrid IT environments not only dramatically reduces the Mean-Time-To-Knowledge of service issues but also assures a flawless user experience and saves enterprises millions of dollars.