Anyone who runs a business today knows that the economy, competition, regulations, and other forces have combined to create an unforgiving business environment. Enterprise executives in this environment struggle to achieve profitability, tasking every department to cut costs and increase productivity.
Given that nearly every commercial enterprise relies on its network for operations as well as revenue generation, it’s surprising that more enterprise executives have not heard the message from their IT departments-investments in network management technology are key to growing the overall bottom line.
When times are good, it’s easy to overlook the more focused or “niche” elements that comprise a typical enterprise network infrastructure. Hardware such as servers, switches, and routers certainly get top-line visibility, but the devices that monitor their performance often don’t. However, today’s challenges provide extra motivation to look at monitoring devices.
A report last year by the industry analyst firm Frost & Sullivan adds evidence to this notion. The report states that while the total network performance monitoring and solutions market remained flat in 2009, it is expected to grow by 7.2 percent in 2010 to more than $1.3 billion. Such data would seem to support what we’ve heard from IT executives, namely that these devices are now becoming part of a standardized solution for enterprise data centers.
Among the tools being adopted are wide area network (WAN) analyzers. IT departments are purchasing them in order to gain insights about critical WAN links, network performance, and adherence to service-level agreements. Other devices being evaluated include application-aware analyzers, which eavesdrop on live communications between servers and clients. They can decode network and application-layer protocols, parse out client/server information, and determine error rates, thus providing an accurate picture of what is taking place on the fiber or wire.
The point that IT executives and data center managers need to continue to emphasize is that these tools are essential for maintaining a healthy network and meeting security and compliance regulations. This is underscored by the observation in the same Frost & Sullivan report, which states, that “Internet usage is lead[ing] to increased security fear among end users.” It is not unrealistic to conclude that having these tools more readily accessible and more easily applied to suspect network trouble spots will go a long way to alleviating such anxiety.