The environments are increasingly hybrid and complex, so IT needs to have an SD-WAN solution and a holistic visibility strategy to ensure your network’s safety and performance.
Corporate networks are increasingly complex. Companies need to address new technological demands from the Cloud, not to mention the hundreds of devices of their employees connected to the internet and accessing corporate data.
Those working with IT know that a traditional network is already outdated and does not support the increased network traffic and current demand from SaaS solutions adopted.
This increase in traffic can result in greater management complexity, unpredictable application performance, data vulnerabilities and difficult visibility.
Therefore, to deal with this new technological scenario in companies, it is necessary to use SD-WAN and adopt a holistic network visibility strategy.
Do you already know this strategy? Follow the content below and learn how to ensure the performance and visibility of your corporate network. Have a good time reading!
How important is the visibility of the corporate network?
The corporate network has undergone several changes in recent years with the proliferation of IoT devices, Cloud computing, encryption, new DevOps processes, among other technologies.
To address this new reality, it was necessary to create a capable “new network”, SD-WAN. Unlike the traditional WAN, it can define the most efficient way to route traffic to remote locations, streamlining network configurations, providing greater agility and visibility, and cutting costs.
As a result, it has become easier to monitor the network’s quality, thus helping the IT department make smart decisions based on application traffic flow.
However, with so many corporate infrastructure changes, another important point to ensure the network’s evolution has been cybersecurity. How to monitor all traffic with users using more and more devices to connect?
The evolution of cybersecurity approaches has become key for IT teams to deal with visibility shortcomings that prevented implementing effective tools to detect and respond to threats.
Security teams need not only to access the traditional direction of the vertical traffic, but they also need visibility between offices, within the data center, in the Cloud, etc.
Therefore, it is necessary to implement a holistic network visibility strategy so IT can offer the level of performance and visibility expected by users.
How to ensure holistic network visibility?
The holistic network’s visibility strategy includes multi-level monitoring, with data bundles, latency, and throughput. This allows you to understand the data’s origins, the requesting party, where they are going and which path they will take.
Thus, IT can more easily find all performance and security issues that affect the corporate network and solve them before anything serious happens and hinders network availability.
A complete SD-WAN solution is needed to adopt this approach, one that allows monitoring the entire network (local and Cloud) through a single platform.
Thus, IT professionals can detect the worse performance of applications, whether in the Cloud or on-site and compare the relative performance to make more assertive decisions.
A single platform offers this holistic view, it is possible to transform data points into valuable insights and avoid issues and loss of continuity in a more agile way.
According to Gartner, “The infrastructure and operations leaders who manage the Cloud and the cutting edge infrastructure that are responsible for the network must:
- • Monitoring the level of proactivity and adapt to application performance problems implementing network visibility.
- • Minimize network congestion and latency by distributing connectivity and increasing edge bandwidth.
- • Improve applications’ performance by leveraging solutions that provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS), WAN optimization and/or half a mile acceleration.
- • Minimize the variability in the performance of broadband access connectivity, taking advantage of the path selection functionality of SD-WAN solutions and provisioning various access circuits.”
Gartner, WAN Practices to Optimize Application Performance, December 2, 2019, Jonathan Forest, Sanjit Ganguli.
As you can see, teams need to address increasingly complex and hybrid networks. Therefore, it is essential to have an SD-WAN solution and a holistic visibility approach to simplify management and, at the same time, ensure high performance and visibility of the entire environment.
