The continued evolution of the Enterprise IT Landscape and the changing nature of how businesses and users interact and transact online has put increasing pressures on IT network performance and application infrastructures. As a result organizations acquire increasing levels of bandwidth from their service providers and introduce new generations of network devices in order to cope with growing network traffic and an ever-increasing number of third party applications. The following factors in particular contribute to this new challenge:

• A trend to consolidate data centers, leaving fewer global hubs and longer distances to end-point users (whether in an office or not)
• End users are becoming more mobile and geographically dispersed, requiring more efficient and advanced remote access solutions as users require office-like (LAN) connectivity and security
• Companies run more and more web based applications, including Internet and Extranet solutions to improve efficiency in their business processes. The introduction of Software as a Service and ‘web 2.0’ bandwidth hungry applications such as video is accelerating the strain on the network to a level where business critical applications are being restricted by non-core applications or even applications being run for personal use
• Outsourcing was a trend since the 90s. Nowadays organizations spread their risk and still out task many parts of their IT systems and services. CIO’s are finding it more and more complicated to manage all outsourced applications and even more challenging to measure the efficiency of the applications. This has created the need for management of those applications and service providers

Typical IT Challenges:

Service Delivery

IT nowadays is all about services: deliver the right applications to the right people at the right time with the right performance. To ensure this delivery, IT organizations need to have insight and control in service availability, application response times, and the performance of application transactions as perceived by end users. 

Manage your IT Vendors

Almost all enterprises show the tendency to go back to their core business. Often enforced by a troubled market, we see a lot of organizations with extensive IT departments starting to outsource their IT responsibilities in order to reduce costs and to improve the agility of the organization. Selecting different service providers for different parts of the IT infrastructure (servers, data storage, network, desktops, etc.) allows you to choose the best offering.  But in the end, who is responsible when performance and stability break down, even when all individual vendors claim to have lived up to their Service Level Agreements?  NetDialog helps IT organizations to get back in control over all their service providers, by providing a single, integrated dashboard that shows application and network performance across the infrastructure and by helping in identifying problem areas. With a small core team IT organizations can manage their service providers and stay in control of their service delivery to their business users. 

Globalization

The world has become a smaller place. While the Internet already provided a huge market growth and wide-area networking facilitated the interaction between different offices within an organization, the upcoming trend of mobile networking now brings even more challenges and opportunities. Both customers and employees are now always online wherever they are, and they expect the same from you. More than before this requires flexibility in your IT infrastructure in terms of resources and connectivity, but this blurs the insight you might already have on your application performance. NetDialog helps you in regaining this insight.

Virtualization & Cloud Computing

IT consolidation can lead to major cost savings. File, Print, Application and Mail servers are consolidated to a central location. Apart from the cost savings other advantages are that IT management becomes less complex and more reliable. A major drawback is that the end user experience of business critical applications will be affected! A decreased application performance often leads to loss of productivity, customer satisfaction and even to loss of revenue. Consolidation projects will only succeed if these important aspects are being taken into account. How to make IT consolidation a success?