The Vital Role of Enterprise Performance Management in Ensuring Digital Transformation Success

No matter what stage in the digital transformation journey an enterprise is at – whether relying on multi-clouds, on-premise data centers, edge computing, remote and hybrid workforces, or a combination of all of the above – the complexities of today’s environment is creating significant network and application performance challenges. The promise of greater cost efficiency, enterprise flexibility, competitive advantage and improved end-user experience is undoubtedly worth the transformation effort, but ensuring application-level performance, availability, and security of large, distributed environments is no small task.

The more distributed the network environment, the bigger the challenges IT faces in assuring performance and availability. Accomplishing this comes down to visibility. Without visibility, and the critical insights that come with it, organizations risk increased latency, undetected security breaches, poor performance, and disruptions to vital connectivity and business critical applications. Slowdowns in network and application performance can have a direct impact to business productivity, revenue, and customer experience.

Today’s operational teams, working in silos with narrowly focused technology tools and data repositories, are fighting an uphill battle. This approach ultimately fails to correlate data in real time and is unable to provide actionable insights. Fragmented visibility into network or application performance inevitably leads to finger pointing in the war room, which in turn slows down detection and remediation of problems.

The Case for Comprehensive Enterprise Performance Management

To achieve the visibility needed to assure performance, organizations should consider taking advantage of a network visibility platform approach. Enterprise performance management offers improvements in performance, security, and availability in an efficient, scalable, and sustainable way. According to a report by Verified Market Research, the Enterprise Performance Management market was valued at nearly $6 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach greater than $10 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 6.5 percent from 2022 to 2030.

Given the increased IT complexity found in today’s distributed environments, a network visibility platform can aggregate traffic data wherever it is seen across the network. As a result, IT organizations can perform deep-packet inspection (DPI) at scale, maintaining a single, central data repository that provides pervasive visibility throughout the distributed environment. Having a single source of end-to-end data in the platform is key to increasing collaboration between NetOps and SecOps teams, as well as third-party network, public cloud, and application vendors, when troubleshooting problems.

Data samples simply don’t provide the granular visibility needed to uncover the root cause of network issues. Whereas, an inspection of all data, end-through-end, enables IT professionals to thoroughly assess network behavior, even in the most complex environments. DPI delivers the necessary context-aware intelligence to uncover problems and become more proactive in addressing them.

A network visibility platform can analyze data in real time, then tie it to specific applications, allowing IT to act quickly when problems are identified. When data is enriched with threat intelligence feeds, the platform can automatically detect known indicators-of-compromise (IoC), enabling greater security vigilance.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Can Be a Performance Game-changer

Fully integrated network visibility platforms that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities – fed by a scalable DPI engine delivering high fidelity metadata and packets – enable IT to reduce false positives and achieve exceptionally high-quality results.

Unlike siloed point products, a network and application visibility platform delivers granular analysis that is essential for reducing the risk of service interruptions and ensuring performance of mission-critical applications. When context around the problem is made available and IT is armed with insights into the root cause of problems, they are in a stronger position to lower mean-time-to-identify (MTTI) and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and prioritize the issues uncovered.

An enterprise performance management platform can enable IT organizations to achieve performance, security, and availability metrics in a more predictable and efficient manner. Because point products are reduced, a common solution shared by NetOps and SecOps can deliver cost saving benefits, as well.

Today’s highly complex distributed IT environments are challenging to assure enterprise performance. A visibility without borders network and application performance management platform provides insight spanning the entire architecture – from the data center to the edge to the cloud. When all collected data is centrally available, IT professionals have fast, easy, reliable, and secure access to provide timely correlation and analysis. These actionable insights help to keep applications and services available and secure, which is essential to the healthy function of any business.