* The need for greater visibility is that most IT organizations are removing some servers out of branch offices and placing them into centralized data centers
The last WAN newsletter highlighted the fact that at the recent Interop conference there was wide agreement on the part of myriad vendors that in order to be successful that IT organizations need visibility into the traffic that transits their network. However, as pointed out in that newsletter, in many cases IT organizations don’t have the level of visibility that the Interop panelists advocated. This newsletter will describe some of the factors that drive the importance of visibility.
We don’t believe that there is one single factor, but rather a confluence of factors that is driving the need for greater visibility. One of the factors driving the need for greater visibility is the fact that most IT organizations are removing at least some servers out of branch offices and placing them into centralized data centers. In addition, many IT organizations are reducing the number of data centers that they support and in some cases implementing a single hosting model for its key applications such as SAP. In a single hosting model, a company may have multiple data centers, but its key applications are housed in only one data center. This coalescence of the vast majority of an IT organization’s critical resources into a small number of data centers is creating an all of your eggs in one basket phenomenon. This means that an outage or a performance problem that impacts access to one or more of the organization’s data centers, impacts an ever-increasing number of users and business processes. This phenomenon creates greater urgency for IT organizations to have visibility into the factors that impact the availability and performance of their key applications and services.
Another factor driving the need for greater visibility is the fact that at the same time that IT organizations are housing corporate applications in a small number of data centers, they are also utilizing a variety of third-party providers for critical applications and services. This includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers such as Salesforce and a growing number of cloud computing vendors such as Amazon and Verizon. Based on how you define it, cloud computing is either a brand new phenomena or a fancy name for outsourcing. In either case, there is growing interest in using SaaS and cloud computing services because of potential for significant cost savings and the relative ease of deployment. The sites that are run by SaaS and cloud computing service providers are accessed using a variety of WAN services including the Internet and MPLS. Independent of the WAN service that is used, IT organizations need end-to-end visibility into how these critical applications and infrastructure components are performing.
The next newsletter will discuss additional factors that are driving the need for visibility and a subsequent newsletter will discuss what IT organizations are doing to gain the visibility they need. In the mean time we want to hear from you. Do you have the type of visibility into your network that you need to do your job? If so, how do you get that visibility?
