Over the last decade, the global IT infrastructure landscape has been rapidly evolving. Mobile technology was followed by the adoption of cloud services, translating into the growing complexity of IT environments.
The pandemic-induced crisis took complexity to the next level when the global workforce moved to remote work. As companies are struggling to survive, telecom operators help to shape this new normal by providing connectivity to handle the growing number of connected devices and zettabytes of data.
But the more complex infrastructure is, the more important reliable and efficient IT infrastructure monitoring becomes in order to help business thrive in the new normal. We have identified 4 key reasons why reliable infrastructure monitoring is a must — let’s see what they are.
Increased workload from remote work
The pandemic has completely changed not only how we live but also how — and where — we work. Now, working from home (WFH) has become the predominant model as social distancing and lockdowns made working in an office close to impossible. In the US alone, the number of employees who work from home 5 days per week or more increased up to 44%.
Change in remote work trends due to COVID-19 in the United States in 2020:
Source: Statista
To support the paradigm shift, the technology came to our rescue, empowering teams with the tools for effective communication, even at a distance. And while mobile collaboration apps and video conferencing solutions are now an essential part of a distributed workplace, remote workforce puts a strain on IT infrastructure. Often built for a fracture of workload, now an enterprise’s infrastructure has to absorb a massive surge in remote employees and their connected personal devices.
How infrastructure monitoring can help
To ensure the network integrity of complex IT environments, remote infrastructure monitoring is a must. Through continuous VPN monitoring, load balancing, ping check, port monitoring, and other tracking activities, remote infrastructure monitoring helps IT teams to ensure low latency, high availability, and uninterrupted connectivity even for the distributed workforce.
Reliable performance
To survive in the new normal, accelerated digitization becomes critically important for businesses across industries and domains. From eLearning platforms to mHealth solutions, companies rely on digital services and applications to support their mission-critical operations and secure stable revenue streams.
Customers, in their turn, also expect companies to meet their needs for rich and dependable experiences now that they rely on digital services more than ever. According to a report from Microsoft, 59% of customers have higher expectations for customer service than a year ago, and 61% of them stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service experience.
How infrastructure monitoring can help
AI-powered monitoring tools can scan across the complete stack — hardware, servers, applications, storage, and databases. By keeping track of important QoS metrics like jitter, packet loss, bandwidth, latency, and more, IT departments can proactively identify performance bottlenecks and availability issues.
These real-time insights into IT systems performance, augmented with historical data, can help IT departments ensure that even the strictest SLAs are met while downtime is kept to a minimum.
Bulletproof cybersecurity
Infrastructure security has always been among top priorities but in the post-pandemic world, it has quickly moved to the front burner. The digital enterprise architecture has transformed to encompass cloud-based applications, mobile devices, local and corporate networks, different endpoints, which significantly expanded the security perimeter and, hence, the attack surface.
To top it up, the global workforce moved to working from home, and devices that typically sat behind a company’s firewalls were now used on home networks plagued by security flaws. And cyber-criminals do not hesitate to exploit these vulnerabilities. Last year, Netscout, a cybersecurity company, for the first time in history observed over 10 mln DDoS attacks — 1.6 mln higher than in 2019. Online scams are on the rise too, increasing by 400% in March 2020 over the previous month. At the same time, Google reported that it was blocking 18 mln malicious emails each day.
How infrastructure monitoring can help
A part of a comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring solution, real-time network monitoring helps SecOps teams to stay on top of potential security threats and respond in a proactive way.
By observing inbound traffic on every network point and analyzing logs, IT teams can timely detect threats and malware. In addition, alerts can be configured to notify administrators about any suspicious activity like a spike in failed password attempts to prevent networks from being compromised by malicious actors.
Cost efficiency
In these turbulent times, cost control is becoming a crucial factor in adapting to the changing business scenarios. And while certain sectors like online shopping and home entertainment are thriving amid the crisis, many businesses experience a decline in traffic and need to optimize their expenditures.
However, as cloud adoption rises, companies face the increasing risk of overspending. According to some estimates, the wasted cloud spending reached $17.6 bln last year. But cost-effective management of complex cloud-based architectures is not possible without end-to-end visibility into resource consumption.
How infrastructure monitoring can help
Idle, over-provisioned, and always-on resources are all sources of wasted cloud spend. IT infrastructure monitoring brings much-needed transparency and helps to identify which workloads are consuming too many resources.
Armed with these in-depth insights, the engineering team can optimize architecture components, eliminate underutilization, and improve ROI. When enhanced with data analytics capabilities, IT infrastructure monitoring solutions enable DevOps to better forecast infrastructure demands and effectively plan capacity to keep overspending at bay.
Key takeaways
IT infrastructure connects all areas of a digital business — hardware, virtual servers, databases, networks, devices, and multi-cloud environments. And now that we live in the new normal and accelerated digital transformation, infrastructure monitoring plays a critical role in supporting operational efficiency and driving business objectives. Main benefits include:
- Comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring allows businesses to manage the complexity caused by a shift to remote work
- Intelligent infrastructure monitoring helps engineering teams keep track of business-critical QoS and QoE metrics to ensure robust performance
- Real-time network traffic monitoring enables IT teams to detect ransomware activity, vulnerable protocols usage, and other cybersecurity threats
- End-to-end visibility into infrastructure utilization helps improve resources consumption, predict needs, and reduce overhead
Drop us a line describing your IT infrastructure monitoring needs, and our experts will get back to you to discuss your project in detail.
