Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) represents the network and security architecture blueprint of the future, consolidating many networking and security point solutions into a single, integrated cloud service. 

The ability to monitor end user experience across a SASE architecture is critical. Here’s one company’s story of how they used digital experience monitoring to gain visibility across their SASE architecture. 

Leading Provider of Healthcare Coverage for 80+ Years

Leading the way in supporting patient-focused care, this health insurance provider delivers coverage to more than 700,000 customers. After transitioning its 1,500+ employees to remote work full time, the business became even more reliant on SaaS applications to collaborate and work efficiently. Today, the company uses multiple, mission-critical SaaS and private applications to run their business. 

Despite this complex IT landscape, IT still needs to ensure consistent, quality service whether people work at home or in the office, without performance bottlenecks or hampered productivity.

Teams Were Troubleshooting in the Dark

A remote workforce puts extra digital demands on the corporate IT, network and security teams who make remote work possible. IT can’t respond fast enough to the flood of questions and escalations from remote workers pouring into their help lines.

When it came to basic troubleshooting, IT and security managers typically had to log into multiple tools just to understand a fraction of their employees’ technology problems, which made their work unnecessarily time consuming. In addition, the existing monitoring tools provided no visibility into the remote worker’s experience. 

IT can’t resolve problems they can’t see or understand. However, many times IT receives help tickets, to address issues typically outside of their control and within the user’s purview, including problems with their devices, WiFi, LAN or ISP. Not only do these inefficiencies and blind spots increase operational costs and MTTR outcomes, they also negatively impact employee productivity and business results.

The business rolled out a SASE solution to enable their workforce of 1,500+ employees to securely work from anywhere, while optimizing user experience with integrated user experience monitoring capabilities.

Results after enabling SASE-Native User Experience Monitoring 

With user experience monitoring, help desk managers now quickly get insights that help identify the cause of experience issues and resolve them. This has reduced Tier 2 and 3 escalation calls by more than 60% and helped them achieve: 

• Proactive IT: They can now resolve problems before users submit support tickets. With data that is accurate and complete about users’ devices, networks, applications, and the experiences of the end-users themselves, a proactive IT approach can lead to a future in which employees never have to suffer an IT issue or submit a ticket again.
• Instant visibility into root cause of problems and a 60% reduction in Tier 2 and Tier 3 escalation calls: Instantly identify the root cause of experience issues, even ones within the user’s purview (e.g. employee’s devices switching between multiple WiFi connections resulting in a poor application experience).  IT managers can identify and resolve a problem quickly without having to escalate to multiple teams or wait for an end user to report it. There is no more ‘passing the buck” among security, network, and application teams or third party service providers regarding root cause which can draw out MTTR to weeks or months. 
• Faster problem resolution: When a Microsoft Teams user calls the helpdesk stating “Teams doesn’t work” or “Teams is slow,” IT can understand issues as varied as if the user’s machine is running hot with high system CPU,  or if they are getting low wifi signal with just a few clicks.
• Operational simplicity: Deployment of SASE-native digital experience management is easy. In just a few clicks, the IT team experienced insights without the overhead of additional software download and complex installation procedures.

To learn more about the benefits other enterprises have achieved read this report from ESG Global, “Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) Yields Benefits Across the Organization”  and sign up for our upcoming webcast to hear experts from ESG, ONUG and Palo Alto Networks discuss how ADEM helps extend visibility and control for a true, end-to-end view of everything in your environment that affects digital employee experience and productivity within a single dashboard.