Insights: You can’t manage what you can’t see

The last two years have been a roller coaster of emotions. In terms of work, we’ve gone from commuting to the workplace to working remotely almost overnight. Now, a hybrid work model with a mix of at-home and at-office employment is gaining traction. It appears that the current situation is the new normal. In fact, the majority of the UAE workforce seems to be in favour of this model.

According to a survey, nearly 90 per cent of UAE employees want to work either in a hybrid or fully remote working model in the future. Additionally, over 70 per cent of organisations in the UAE have adopted a hybrid working model.

This hybrid paradigm brings with it a great deal of network complexity. As a result, IT professionals are faced with the enormous task of assuring business continuity and faultless network, application, and service performance. Troubleshooting any issues that develop in such scattered infrastructures, on the other hand, is tough at best. When a bank’s network goes down, for example, financial transactions that must be completed instantly can be harmed, resulting in high customer unhappiness. Or when a factory’s Wi-Fi-dependent production process is halted owing to a prolonged disruption in connectivity, causing a supply chain ripple effect. Slowdowns or delays in the performance of critical apps can have a serious impact on sales, customer service, and ultimately the bottom line for shops and restaurants, who increasingly rely on touchless payments and curb side pickup.

Lack of visibility out to the edge is a major problem
In today’s hybrid environment, visibility is essential in three separate areas – the data centre, cloud services edge, and the client edge. What all of these diverse edges have in common is that this is where the traffic is altered as it crosses from one domain to another.

This creates blind spots or gaps in visibility. As we move further away from the data centre toward the edge, IT teams are forced to confront infrastructure that it doesn’t own or control. This makes it difficult to manage and provide a unified end-user experience regardless of location.

IT firms simply cannot afford to ignore solutions that bridge the visibility gap, particularly when the company’s brand reputation and productivity are at stake. IT teams require visibility out to the edge in order to completely comprehend a situation.

You can’t manage what you can’t see. The key is to increase visibility at every edge, although this is quite impractical and entirely too expensive to instrument at every different edge. Another shortfall is that some monitoring solutions provide insight into what’s going on with the end-user experience, but you are not able to pinpoint why there is a problem.

IT requires a combination of both passive and active synthetic-based monitoring to gain an accurate and complete picture. The right solution will enable IT to examine the wire packets and the results of the synthetic testing, so they can uncover why issues are happening.

As complexity increases, IT needs a tool that can work across all applications in order to observe what’s going on and then provide evidence that can be shared with service and application providers, putting an end to finger-pointing and the blame game.

Emad Fahmy is the systems engineering manager – Middle East at Netscout

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