Thursday, March 28, 2024

march, 2024

Are Network Blind-Spots Derailing Your Digital Transformation Train?

When dealing with digital transformation initiatives, having visibility into IT infrastructure should be a requirement, not a choice. Unfortunately, many of today’s CIOs find themselves outside their comfort zone, lacking the visibility they need to make the day-to-day decisions that keep their business running and transforming smoothly. These network blind spots can have a significant impact on the organization. How can CIOs overcome these visibility challenges and keep their technology initiatives from being derailed?

Typically, a CIO focuses on ensuring mission-critical applications and services stay up and up-to-date, allocating adequate team resources, and resolving a variety of issues on tight deadlines. It requires interfacing with the heads of application and infrastructure teams, living at the war- room doorstep, and fighting uphill battles with a board that traditionally views IT as a cost center. As a result, many CIOs spend large portions of their time trying to figure out how to do more with less by make existing IT tools, practices, and processes more efficient and cost-effective.

The reality is that visibility should always be a key priority for a CIO across his or her application and infrastructure framework. Having blind spots inside the IT service delivery framework (such as compute, network, and data traffic) can severely impact performance and result in under or over-provisioning; all of which can affect the user-experience, disrupt business continuity, drive down profitability, drive customers to the competition and much more.

The CIO also has partial (or total) ownership over any digital transformation initiatives the company decides to roll out and a lack of visibility into these initiatives can have serious consequences. For example, think about the move toward more cloud technologies. Without adequate visibility, cloud migration is like throwing applications into a black box. Not thinking about the visibility mechanisms inside the cloud can result in a CIO losing control over mission-critical workloads under peak demand, and severely impact business and reputation. Without adequate prior performance and cost modeling, moving to the cloud raises business risk and the organization’s cost of doing business. Visibility is key for a cloud migration to proceed without incident and improve the efficiency of the business in the long term.

Another example of a digital transformation initiative that can be risky without adequate visibility is consolidating the applications and data center sites. This may cause an increase in static digital data and data-in-motion between applications and sites. A large portion of this data is east-west traffic that never leaves the data center; and that is where IT has the worst blind spots, which increases business risk. If applications go down or the performance drops, it will take longer for IT to investigate the issue and resolve it. All the while, the business is losing money. Provisioning the right mechanisms for visibility into east-west traffic can reduce this risk, not to mention reduce the CIO’s headache.

Hopefully it has sunk in: blind spots are bad, and visibility is good! So, how do you achieve “adequate visibility?” First, it’s critical that visibility be a CIO-level initiative. That doesn’t mean the CIO should be staring at a screen all day in his or her office. Rather the CIO should focus on three primary items: 1) adequate visibility across the IT service delivery framework, 2) awareness associated with the darkest and riskiest blind spots that could impact the business, and 3) a plan and a budget that can remove those risks.

The functional heads can then help the CIO figure out what appropriate measures need to be taken in terms of applications and infrastructure visibility and how much spend should be allocated for the appropriate tools, resources and training. These heads, such as a Vice President or Director of Network Operations, should do a complete domain assessment and extend the level of visibility throughout the dark corners of their network purview. For example, are all of the remote-offices covered in terms of having remote visibility into the ingress/egress of wired/wireless/VPN traffic and the user experience? Is there visibility into the WAN traffic patterns for cost and performance optimization? Can you see all of the north-south and east-west traffic associated with your most critical asset, the data center? And, as you add cloud to the IT domain, do you have insight into those zones?

At the VP and Director level, there should be enough visibility mechanisms laid out that when the CIO calls them into the war-room to discuss issues associated with digital transformation, they can immediately point out if an issue is within their domain or not, without external dependency, and back it up with the data. This level of visibility reduces finger-pointing, saves precious time, and reduces the need for future war room meetings.

CIO’s should be asking their department heads what their visibility strategy is for any technology initiative, and they should already have a functional strategy in place. When it comes to actionable and evidence-based visibility, nothing beats the network data that’s been captured, retained and analyzed to assure business-critical application performance and user experience. When it comes to data, the infrastructure team cannot control what it cannot see. And from the CIO’s perspective over-provisioning is a good thing when it comes to visibility.

Savvius

Nadeem Zahid
Nadeem Zahid
Nadeem Zahid leads the strategy, technology alliances and business development at Savvius. Nadeem has over 21 years of leadership experience in the networking industry with leading technology companies including Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, and Extreme Networks as well as his own IT consulting/ISV company for Fortune 500 IT clients. Nadeem holds a master’s degree in Technology Management from Boston University, a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from N.E.D. University, Pakistan, a Project Management certificate from MIT, and Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certificate from Cisco.

Related Articles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Stay Connected

1,595FansLike
0FollowersFollow
24FollowersFollow
2,892FollowersFollow
0SubscribersSubscribe

Latest News