Remote Office Visibility boosts application performance as well as end-user experience

Covid -19 pandemic has created new ways of working with shifts in business models.  There will be an increase in remote work with the 4^th wave of the pandemic around the corner, driving organizations to further embrace the hybrid model.  This new system will support retaining existing employees and attracting new talent.

In the new business model, employees depend on remote access to services hosted by corporate networks, including data-centre-based voice systems and web applications.  It becomes challenging to guarantee reliability, responsiveness and end-user experience, irrespective of how users are connecting and from which location.  In addition to other aspects of transformed business that have to be managed and IT, teams have to assure end-user experience and application performance.

Moving services to the cloud and infrastructures to co-locations, besides adopting new software-as-a-service applications, have all led to more complexities in the entire ecosystem.  Unfortunately, both VPN (Virtual Private Network) and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), the earlier-generation technologies are not suitable for the WFH (Work from Home)  era, where the VPN concentrator is now the favourite target for DDoS attacks. Bad actors are aware of the huge impact the organization will have when a relatively small DDoS state exhaustion attacks against VPN concentrators that are running at or near connection capacity.

Filling VPN concentrators with illegitimate connections denies connections to a legitimate WFH workforce, impacting productivity, especially when the VPN connections have expanded dramatically with the new remote working culture. VDI, being sensitive to network performance is another challenge for the IT team.

IT teams are trying to gain the required visibility and control for troubleshooting and addressing performance issues for a better digital employee experience.  This next-gen corporate infrastructure includes an explosion of edges- the data centre, cloud or the edge of the network, with visibility across these edges being crucial.  Only vendor-agnostic visibility will be able to identify these underlying issues.

Let us take the case of a global software leader delivering products to businesses for four decades and having offices across North America, EMEA, Latin America and Asia.  It has employees who have to access its corporate network to perform their jobs. Several years earlier, this organization had already implemented relevant solutions to ensure high-quality performance of the voice, video and business data services. Solutions for service edge visibility into network and application performance and management of the critical business services were already present in the organization’s data centre.

The period which started with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic saw data centre upgrades, digital transformations and service migrations.  The organization wanted to expand visibility to their upgraded segments in the data centre, major remote offices and recently migrated cloud-based applications and services.  It also wanted to ensure the performance and availability of its critical business applications at the remote network and client edges.

The Software company then opted to leverage relevant solutions that delivered visibility expansion to further reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK), thus bringing about meaningful improvements in Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) in complex global enterprise environments.

The solution also helped in providing the most comprehensive monitoring, trending and analysis for the organization.  This proactively supported employee digital experience in its remote and corporate locations and the performance of applications was assured too, wherever they were hosted. The IT team acknowledged the value and importance of combining proactive, packet-based monitoring and synthetic testing, and implemented a thoughtful, strategic deployment plan covering data centre and cloud service edges, network edges in remote locations as well as client edges.

WFH individuals were thus able to have the best digital employee experience with any application, from anywhere.

Visibility into user activity, network performance and application dependencies are crucial to developing a roadmap in an edge computing environment, for better flexibility, performance, security as well as enhanced user experience for the current and future workforce.

Authored By: Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT.