Digital transformation is driving change in many ways, leading enterprises to deploy new applications, expand into multi-cloud architecture, and adopt new network infrastructure. The network can be a competitive differentiator for these digital initiatives.
Infrastructure initiatives such as a migration to public cloud or SD-WAN are frequently done as a replacement of existing infrastructure. It is critical to monitor the before, during, and after performance metrics of all network elements involved.
What are Data-Driven Change Initiatives?
Data-driven change initiatives can ensure the success of major IT rollouts with comprehensive analysis of each step of any deployment within the network.
- New Application Rollout: Network managers should identify the infrastructure that will support a new application before the rollout begins.
- Cloud Migration: Investments point to the cloud. Legacy technology is being phased out of businesses as the flexibility and scalability of cloud platforms steps into the limelight.
- SD-WAN Transformation: Today’s software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solutions provide good native visibility into network overlays, but they often lack visibility into end-to-end WAN performance.
How Network Managers Can Lead Data-Driven Change with Network Performance Management
- Baseline existing services: Network managers should use their NPM platform to Identify service dependencies, map traffic patterns and user behavior, and establish basic capacity requirements for the existing service.
- Guide implementation of new services: Leveraging the power of a modern NPM platform, network managers can generate and share reports on baselined services with the implementation team.
- Validate Implementation: Network managers can monitor and analyze service performance after data-driven implementation.
The Challenge
Poor Planning Leads to Failed Change Initiatives Approaching any IT roll-out must be done with a proper data-driven strategy. Poor planning of new digital initiatives can damage the overall success of an enterprise. It also places a heavy burden on network operations teams, who are tasked with supporting poorly planned transformation.
- One-quarter of enterprises say poorly implemented infrastructure projects are highly disruptive to network operations today
- Today, failed infrastructure projects are the third leading challenge to network operations success.
- Just two years ago, failed projects ranked sixth among network operations challenges.
The Solution
Ensure Success by Enabling Data-Driven Change Initiatives
With an effective network performance management (NPM) platform, network operations teams can provide guidance for planning, implementing, and validating a change to digital services. This platform will also support ongoing optimization and management of digital infrastructure.
You Need the Right Tool to Manage Change
- Extensibility: The platform should be able to collect, correlate and analyze a wide variety of network and infrastructure data, including cloud provider flow logs, management systems APIs, logs, network flows and packets.
- Comprehensive visibility: Lack of end-to-end visibility is a significant challenge for NetOps teams. Any tool should be able to visualize, monitor, and analyze end-to-end networks.
- Data retention: Change requires historical data to provide a full picture of pre-deployment and post-deployment parameters.
- Real-time analysis: When validating success of a change initiative, real-time visibility into service performance will be critical to remediating problems and optimizing digital services.
- Flexibility: Any operations platform should support multiple change initiatives. NetOps teams shouldn’t need to acquire a new tool for each project.
Download Drive Change Initiatives Executive Brief PDF