Top Business Goal: Faster Deployment of Apps and Services

As digital transformation (DX) drives the rapid pace of technology innovation, IT professionals are under increasing pressure to speed the development and deployment of applications and services – all while maintaining quality and cutting costs.  In today’s connected world, delivering a better customer experience is key to business success. 

To meet this growing demand, companies are finding themselves compelled to expand their infrastructure by migrating compute applications and storage workloads to the cloud and delivering services through hybrid, on-prem and public cloud environments. As Internet of Things (IoT) devices continue to permeate both personal and business environments, and 5G connectivity eventually unlocks a brave new world of digital possibilities, the importance of maintaining connectivity and communication across a host of wireless and wired, physical and virtual, local and wide area networks (WAN) will be absolutely imperative.

In the headlong dash to embrace DX, businesses shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of ensuring their investments in hybrid cloud are delivering true business value. This means technology infrastructure must be reliable and capable of meeting demands. To do this, organizations should continuously monitor their entire infrastructure in order to gain end-to-end visibility into all business services and interdependencies, so problems can be quickly pinpointed and repairs made before any impact to the business.

Adding to the challenge, large volumes of data are being generated by new applications and infrastructure components, such as IoT, putting greater burdens on networks and storage capacity. Collecting raw log data and sending it to a central location for storage and processing dramatically increases the size and cost of storage and communications over the WAN.

To address this challenge, businesses are increasingly taking a smart data approach, which boils down the traffic flows collected close to the source and compresses it into metadata, allowing organizations to hold onto only the data that represents real value. Smart data can then be used to uncover invaluable business insights that give companies a competitive edge. And because smart data is compressed, it dramatically reduces the volume of data that must be stored, reducing costs and burdens on precious resources.

Smart data has already proven its worth across a range of industries, such as automotive, manufacturing and healthcare, powering services, operations and business analytics. This trend will continue as DX reaches across nearly every business sector, driving a greater reliance on new technologies and the networks and infrastructure that supports them.

This blog is based on the article, 2018 Predictions: Rapid Transformation, Smart Data and Mission-Critical Connectivity written by Michael Segal, Area Vice President Strategy at NETSCOUT, which was published on APMdigest.