Shaving seconds off: Shadow IT and SLAs

Networks, infrastructure, cloud service providers, internal IT, shadow IT – with so many elements required to deliver an online application to the end user, who’s the culprit to blame when an online application fails to deliver service?

Analyst firm Forrester recently reported that 31-percent of corporate network performance issues, take more than a month to resolve. The Ponemon Institute research, reported that the average network outage costs USD7,900 per minute.

As lines of businesses (LOBs) take matters into their own hands, by buying their own IT resources and services, they usually do so without the required service-level agreements that enterprise IT departments would insist on having in place. The emergence of this kind of shadow IT, gives rise to more complications, even as more and more business departments realise the ease with which to deploy services via cloud computing.

Amit Rao

As part of their Borderless Enterprise initiative, Fluke had launched the software-as-a-service based TruView Live, which extends its on-premise network activity and performance monitoring to cloud applications as well.

To date, Fluke’s solutions work in conjunction with three types of active test sensors called Pulse.  For example, TruView Pulse is a small plug-and-play, active test micro-appliance that connects directly to the network on any Ethernet port.

The premise for this more holistic view of network activity, is that businesses are so dependent on network connectivity these days, and it is hard to find an industry that wouldn’t find value in monitoring and optimising their network performance.

Cloud applications

As e-commerce and online banking services start to gain wider adoption, being able to shave off milliseconds off a website’s or an application’s response time, could make all the difference in how long a user remains a paying customer.

Even service provides and governments, are deploying WiFi hotspots to offload some of the Internet traffic on cellular technologies like 3G and 4G; being able to know where to optimally place an access point, allows the maximum number of users to get Internet coverage.

These days, even voice and video already make up 60-percent of Internet traffic, underlining the significant role that connectivity plays for businesses.

Fluke Networks’ Senior Director of Business Development, Amit Rao said, “Asia Pacific is one of the fastest growing regions for us. Customers from segments like service providers, banking, enterprises, manufacturing… anybody for whom network is a critical component of operations, need to have fast network speeds.”

A report by RightScale, found that 82-percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74-percent in 2014.