<div>The key challenge of the modern enterprise’s IT infrastructure is to connect a diverse range of elements – its own staff, branch offices and data centers as well as its business partners and end-customers. In addition, each of these elements demands high-quality network and application performance. Failure to deliver totally reliable, high-quality IT infrastructure can affect each user’s ability to complete key business transactions and hence could potentially impact the company’s bottom line. The modern enterprise therefore needs to address this comprehensively, with an end-to-end performance platform and mitigate potential risk to the business due to under-performing IT infrastructure. <br /><br /><strong>The Changing IT Landscape<br /></strong>Business operations are ever-evolving and this growth is geographic, too – major enterprise IT workloads are now commonly dispersed among remote branch offices, which makes communication and data transfer performance between locations extremely critical to ensure productivity. Workplace trends are gearing towards the increased preference for a BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) culture, increased use of social media, remote working, and reliance on web-based services for in-house tasks.<br /><br />Further, the increasing number of connected devices is contributing to increased internet traffic. And, with more enterpriseslooking to drive business processes and activities via the internet, business internet traffic is constantly increasing. Thirdly, the growing emergence oftechnology trends including cloud computing, Big Data and M2M communication areonly going to exacerbate the problem of traffic growth and congestion in the internet realm.<br /><br />With nature’s adapt-or-perish mentality extending to the organisational framework, enterprises have been slowly migrating to new and evolving business norms. Thecloud is one such pattern. Among the factors that have spurred on this change, globalisation, volatility across political, economicand social arenas, and virtualisation remain the top contributors.<br /><br /><strong>Network Performance Problems: </strong> One of the biggest roadblocks for modern businesses<br />today is heir dependence on wired and wireless networks for business productivity. These networks have become so integrated with business structures that a network slowdown often constitutes a company-wide crisis. Slow or unresponsive applications that support key business processes can cause revenue loss, reduced customer satisfaction, employee productivity and impact brand reputation.<br /><br />Further, there is such a large disparity in cost and availability of bandwidth for enterprises, that network and application performance enhancements will be unavoidable to bridge the qualitative gap with business expectations.<br /><br /><strong>A Complete IT Performance Solution </strong><br />In the hunt for solutions to improve the reliability, availability, scalability and security of their IT systems, organisations depend on measures to increase the visibility into and efficiency of both their private networks and Internet-based activities. The following are the three key technologies organisations must implement in order to ensure comprehensive IT performance delivery:<br />• Application-Aware Network Performance Management (AA-NPM)<br />• WAN Optimisation Controllers (WOC)<br />• Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)<br /><br />Emerging demand for services like partner networking and web-based e-commerce now needs to be supported by application performance management and acceleration technologies. These new realities come with a four-fold set of requirements, or the four pillars of application networking solutions: application availability, optimised application performance, robust application security, and traffic visibility for backend analytics.<br /><br />Also, IT operations are increasingly looking to have visibility into all application and network traffic across all environments – physical and virtual – from the user to the networkc ore and also the cloud. They are trying to know what each application is doing, who’s using it and how well it’s performing, in any environment. The following three-pronged approach could help organisations counter their IT performance issues.<br /><br />• Firstly, WOCs and ADCs can help eliminate network and application performance problems inside the Enterprise IT environment<br />• Secondly, a combined ADC and WOC strategy can accelerate both the publicand private cloud<br />• Finally, the combination of “cloud-enabled” ADCs and WAN optimisation technology will allow enterprises to leverage full potential of both their own internal ITinfrastructure as well as cloud-based services<br /><br />Businesses need to ensure that their networking solutions provide powerful toolsfor visibility and performance management in a dynamic environment where bothprivate and public infrastructure will be present. As business transformation continues and new IT service models emerge, organisations face increasingly complex IT environments. As their IT infrastructure adapts to these new realities, enterprises are expected to move more of their technology footprint into the cloud.<br /><br />In this scenario, enterprises should harness the best of modern ADC, WOC and network & application performance management (AA-NPM) technologies to build a complete end-to-end IT performance platform that can deliver optimum performance to any user, any application, anywhere.<br /><br /><br />(Robert Healey is Marketing Evangelist, APAC and Japan, Riverbed Technology)<br /> </div>
