How LiveAction Can Help Better Manage Your Digital Transformation Initiatives

Driven by a variety of innovative technologies including cloud, containers, open source projects, SD-WAN, machine learning, and AI, NFV, and more, today’s digital transformation initiatives are fundamentally changing the way we do business. As a matter of fact, IDC predicts that worldwide spending on digital transformation will surpass $1 trillion by the end of 2018. All of these technology initiatives have one thing in common, they rely on high-performing, elastic and reliable networks. Which raises the question, “How do you maintain the level of network performance amid such rapid and complex shifts in IT infrastructure required to maintain the high service level expectations of the business?”

My friend and colleague, Larry Zulch, the General Manager of Savvius, and EVP at LiveAction, recently wrote a great article for Forbes on this topic. In it, he explores the role of network management and end-to-end network visibility in the context of three primary areas of digital transformation.

1. Cloud – “From a network standpoint, the cloud presents some very real challenges. First and foremost, cloud infrastructure is fundamentally “dark.” The built-in visibility is limited at best, so when there’s a problem, troubleshooting can be challenging. To manage cloud environments, NetOps teams must continuously spend time ensuring stable performance. This is not a ‘set and forget’ resource.

To do this, they need tools that can do three things. First, they must access the relevant data, whether that’s network traffic or the network traffic itself. Second, they must monitor relevant data for trends and anomalies. And finally, they must analyze that data to uncover deeper insights they can use to make adjustments or fix problems.”

How does LiveAction help customers address cloud management? Our User Experience module monitors the end-user experience of web applications deployed in any cloud over any network. Whether you have a traditional or emerging software-defined network, we give teams the ability to proactively manage the availability and performance of any SaaS application or public cloud service so they can solve problems fast. This capability is critical, especially as more and more of the workforce uses mobile or remote applications that rely heavily on cloud-based applications

2. Edge Computing and IoT –“While edge computing and IoT are quite different technologies, they are converging as the flood of IoT data and increasing demands for responsive computing become aligned. Applying the visibility mantra of ‘access, monitor, and analyze’ that we just established leads to some unique challenges when locations and network components requiring access are geographically distributed. Once data across that broad range is accessed and collected, extracting useful data from the noise requires sophisticated presentation.

Sometimes, your team’s monitoring equipment will point to the issue, enabling a speedy fix. But, it’s the dark corners of the network (areas that aren’t monitored) that are all too often the location of network issues.”

3. Machine Learning (and AI) – “As compute power has scaled, more complex models (for machine learning) have been created that can accomplish some pretty amazing things. But wouldn’t it be useful to have the knowledge of a network administrator contained in software, monitoring tirelessly for – and even anticipating – issues that might require attention? Absolutely, but the challenge of machine learning comes from the importance of context – the situational awareness we as humans often take for granted. For network performance, some form of visibility is required for context and to establish a baseline.”

To help our customer better support their NetOps teams and automate tasks and anomaly detection, LiveNX has a machine learning module called LiveNX Insight. It continuously identifies patterns and insights from customer meta-data and provides real-time notifications that help manage application bandwidth, path change anomalies, network detections, and more.

Network management should play a leading role in any digital transformation initiative. Having the ability to simplify complex networks and gain comprehensive visibility across multi-vendor, multi-fabric, hybrid networks is more important than ever. By continuing to consolidate network management functionality into LiveNX, we’re offering customers the most powerful solutions for managing today’s complex networks.

Read Larry’s entire article now.

Considering migrating to SD-WAN to support your digital transformation plans? Check out our webinar on future proofing your SD-WAN investment.  Want to learn more about LiveNX? Get a demo today. Or, read about how we’re using machine learning to support the growing demands of network management in this whitepaper.Brooks Borcherding
CEO at LiveAction

Sept. 6, 2018