In our last WAN newsletter we discussed some research that was sponsored by NetQoS. One of the most interesting results of that research was the fact that the vast majority of IT organizations have taken the time and effort it takes to identify a small set of applications that are business-critical. In this newsletter, we will identify some of what has changed as a result of those efforts.
We typically advise our clients to identify the key components (e.g., WAN links, servers, etc.) of their IT infrastructure. By ‘key components’ we mean the components of the IT infrastructure that directly support their business critical applications. Because we feel that task is so important, we were pleased when almost 80% of the survey respondents indicated that their IT organization has mapped the supporting network infrastructure components on which their critical applications depend.
We asked the survey respondents to indicate, “How much time do you spend monitoring the health and performance of the critical network infrastructure components compared with the non-critical components?” By a small margin, the survey respondents indicated that they spend more time monitoring the critical network components than they do the non-critical ones. More interesting, however, was the fact that roughly 15% of the survey respondents indicated that they only monitor the critical network components.
We believe that an effective Network Operations Center (NOC) is critical to the success of the IT organization. We also believe, however, that the NOC needs to evolve to where its focus is a bit less on the network and a bit more on applications. With that thought in mind, the survey respondents were asked if they agreed with the statement that their organization had redesigned and/or restructured their NOC to focus on ensuring acceptable application performance. Over half of the survey respondents either agreed, or agreed strongly with that statement.
We will continue explore this market research in future newsletters. In the mean time, more information can be found here. We would also like to hear from you. What efforts has your IT organization taken to focus on applications? What has been the affect of these efforts?
