Digital Business Requires an End-to-End Intelligence for WAN Edge

Digital Transformations Get Pervasive – Driving Enterprise Productivity, Efficiency and Competitiveness

CIOs across enterprise verticals are investing in digital transformation initiatives, driving a digital era like never before. According to IDG’s 2018 Digital Business research, 89% of the organizations have adopted a digital-first strategy. 32% of IT decision makers have testified that digital transformation has already helped them to meet their revenue growth objectives.

Enterprises today, of all sizes, are constantly finding new ways of being agile and remaining competitive in the face of extreme competition. Businesses evaluate digital transformation as an important element to achieve some key objectives, such as data generation for AI assisted processes, to better manage business performance through access and visibility of data, agility to drive business transformation, augmenting meeting of customer expectations and developing new digital businesses and revenue streams. A starting point for enterprises is to deploy various customer facing and employee-centric enterprise applications that can deliver the legendary effectiveness and rich experience that customers and employees have come to expect.

Digital Transformation is Boosted by Enterprise Cloud Migrations

Enterprises are rapidly adopting a cloud-first strategy to support their digital aspirations. As enterprises adopt various critical applications to fulfill their digital ambitions, they look at an agile way to deploy these applications across their branches, both locally and globally, without the complexity of manual intervention and investing CAPEX for doing so.

To enable this, enterprises are going through swift cloud transformation, migrating their existing and new enterprise applications from the data center to the cloud. As enterprises implement this transformation, the application performance and quality of application delivery are becoming increasingly critical. To ensure these factors, enterprise WAN needs to be dependable, resilient and swiftly responsive.

As enterprises embark on their digital transformation journey, they need to look at the various options available to evolve their WAN to support new applications and their performance now and in the future. Enterprises are driving vendors to devise application-based SLAs than network-based SLA, to ensure and guarantee application availability and performance.

Hybrid WAN Networks Great – But How are your Applications Performing?

Enterprises are enthusiastically and ambitiously migrating their mission-critical and bandwidth-heavy applications to the cloud. However, this trend has brought forth the requirement of having a compatible WAN, which can intelligently manage both the hybrid networks and the applications that traverse through them. As applications get more complex and demand higher bandwidths for efficient processing, enterprises have added more transport links to their existing MPLS network. Although this has established additional bandwidth and connectivity between branches, data center and the cloud, there is a looming requirement of effective management of the network traffic to ensure application performance. Guaranteed availability of mission-critical applications and ensuring their optimized performance becomes an important qualification for the success of enterprise digital transformation.

The Need for Intelligence with your Application Performance

While enterprises are investing and building their application ecosystem for a successful digital transformation, they must also ensure that their applications are executing optimum performance through the network. To enable this, enterprises need to choose a solution that can intelligently manage the enterprise WAN, based on business intent, goals and objectives. Critical elements of this intelligence include:

Application visibility – to guarantee the performance of business applications requires full visibility on application usage and level of performance

Application QoE control – to ensure QoE of complex application performance based on priority and quality of links available by manipulating traffic flows

Dynamic WAN selection (DWS) – to allow for dynamically selecting underlying links based on traffic quality and performance

Application troubleshooting – based on analysis of various metric, the solution should be able to identify the source of an issue and allow network and application teams to solve the performance problem

Application quality score – Application Quality Score (AQS) enables enterprises to see how application performance is perceived by end users and how it is aligned with business objectives. The AQS can be used as a common KPI, relevant to all applications.

Solutions that deliver on each of these criteria will provide the application intelligence modern digital enterprises need!

 

Author's Bio

Sylvain Quartier

Senior Vice President, Digital Enterprise Product Strategy at InfoVista