Can enterprise network visibility reduce transformation risks?
Ernst Kolmeijer
Product Director, Platform
C-suite executives across the board are looking at digital transformation and weighing the opportunities against the risks. Integrating transformative digital technologies will give you better business processes, greater efficiency, business growth and innovation, better customer and employee satisfaction. But not factoring in the impact transformation has on your network can introduce huge risks. Unplanned downtime, lagging or slow applications, and frustrated customers and employees can occur.
These risks all hinge on a high-performing network you can monitor, optimize, and scale. And that needs enterprise network visibility. Without adequate network visibility across every site and location, it’s like trying to drive in a car with blacked-out windows.
Exploring the network risks of digital transformation
Every digital initiative needs to be strategically coordinated with simultaneous network transformation. If you haven’t already, check out my colleague Jean-Philippe’s article on this.
The irony is that digital transformation provide business benefits, no one is arguing with that, but it also undoes the foundational and relied upon elements that keep a business running. The network is a great example of this. Your NetOps and SecOps teams will be under pressure to ensure optimal network performance and threat detection amidst a state of fluctuating needs and inputs as you transform.
This introduces new risks like:
- Network blind spots: The rapid growth of extensive sites and cloud applications has created new areas of darkspace across the network—zones your operations and security teams struggle to monitor effectively. As organizations expand their reliance on external services, entities, and modern technologies, legacy visibility tools fail to keep pace, leaving critical blind spots in your security posture.
- Data leaks: Effective network design, combining underlay and overlay architectures, is crucial to minimizing risks and preventing data and security leaks. Cloud applications and services, while powerful, are notoriously difficult to monitor. Although cloud providers offer built-in tools, these are often insufficient to address comprehensive security needs. Misconfigurations in the cloud remain one of the leading causes of data breaches, exposing your business, clients, and employees to significant risks.
- Network bottlenecks: Transformative technologies increase the number of pathways for traffic to flow through your network, and increase the traffic itself. This can add complexity, performance issues, and bottlenecks that can impact the day-to-day operations of your business. Bandwidth-intensive applications, like video applications for example, can put a lot of strain on your network and impact other critical applications from performing optimally.
With a more distributed network come greater risks of downtime, performance delays and security breaches. And just to emphasize the point, data shows that downtime for any reason can cost organizations between $300,000 and $400,000 an hour.
How can network visibility mitigate transformation risks?
Enterprise network visibility allows you to shine a light where it is needed, across your entire network estate. I was interested to see that the Expereo commissioned IDC InfoBrief, Enterprise Horizons 2024: Technology Leaders’ Priorities on their Digital Business Journey revealed that 97% of enterprise technology leaders believe network visibility is moderately to extremely important to helping their organization achieve their goals.
However, network visibility was also the joint most difficult connectivity challenge the 650 technology leaders surveyed face while transforming their business:
- Cybersecurity threats: 30%
- Network visibility and observability: 30%
- Cloud connectivity: 28%
Source: IDC Technology Leaders Survey, March 2024 (N = 650).
In my opinion, while ensuring granular levels of enterprise network visibility may be a challenge, the benefits it brings are extremely valuable.
The benefits of network visibility and how they decrease transformation risks include:
- Early issue detection
Comprehensive visibility into network traffic is essential, but early detection of anomalies, bottlenecks, and potential failures is beyond the capacity of manual staff monitoring. Smart monitoring systems combined with event-driven automation are critical to identifying issues such as latency spikes, packet loss, and bandwidth constraints before they escalate into critical problems.
- Enhanced security posture
As I’ve mentioned, digital transformation like cloud technologies, often expand the attack surface. Network visibility ensures all endpoints, devices, and data flows are monitored. Reducing vulnerabilities, allowing you to keep your people, places, and data safe.
- Optimized resource allocation
Having real-time access to clear insights into network usage ensure resources are efficiently allocated for load balancing and cost control. This allows you to make informed decisions about how you invest further in scaling your network or technology investments.
- Improved collaboration between teams
Network visibility fosters collaboration across IT, security, and operations teams by providing a unified view of the network. That can mean shared dashboards with centralized data access for alignment and informed decision-making as well as cross-team troubleshooting. The better your teams can collaborate and work together, the better they will be able solve any issues quickly and efficiently.
- Supports a Zero Trust Architecture
Adopting zero trust security principles is a cornerstone of modern transformations and reducing risk. Network visibility is key to enforcing least-privilege access with continuous monitoring to authenticate and monitor all devices, users, and data flows as well as policy enforcement.
- Real-time insights for agility
Real-time network insights allow you to dynamically adjust to traffic demands or new services and adapt quickly to changing business needs. This means you can scale your transformation up or down with accurate network data. Allowing you to simultaneously scale your network to keep pace.
You need an element of automation here too, just showing data is not enough. Due to the high volume of events in any network, often going beyond what support staff can handle, having automated alerts, reviews, updates and notifications can improve your speed of response and reduce any downtime.
But not all network visibility tools were created equal
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of network visibility tools available. Unfortunately, they all offer different levels of enterprise network visibility. Not to mention you have to consider integrating them into your existing technology stack, and then ensuring configurability with your different Internet Service Providers.
This is quite often the sticking point where customers get lost.
I’ve seen companies who use multiple, disparate Internet Service Providers for global network connectivity. Some of their sites and services will show in some tools and others will show elsewhere. All presenting information in different ways, with different interfaces. And, more importantly, some are in-depth and others will stay high-level. So you never get a complete picture.
One memorable instance that demonstrates how challenging this can be was a customer who did multiple checks on certain circuits during a digital transformation project, but just couldn’t figure out if they were active or not. Literally switching off the circuits was the last resort. Having blind spots in your network is far from ideal and will bring additional costs and maintenance efforts. You also risk introducing additional security threats.
See the full picture to manage your global enterprise network
As we’ve seen, it’s imperative that your IT teams have the right visibility and control of your network infrastructure so you can transform your business and see the right efficiency outcomes across the board.
expereoOne gives you a complete enterprise network visibility across every product, site and user. You can monitor performance and establish the best way to allocate your efforts to maximize efficiency and ROI. It’s intuitive, easy to access and simple to use. Saving you time with everything you need at your fingertips via a single pane of glass.