Digital Transformation is no longer an option if businesses have to remain competitive and retain customers who have gone digital. Moreover, along with customers purchasing and using products or services, they are providing valuable insights and feedback to business houses in real-time which is key to the organization’s growth. Technology is at the core of every organization today as enterprises are compelled to transform. Across industry verticals, a secure, high-performance digital ecosystem is not a choice anymore. It is critical to ensure world-class performance, security, and availability at enterprise scale.
But, today, digital ecosystems are more distributed and complex than ever before. The point solutions that were built and leveraged earlier to address targeted network use cases or isolated security challenges have today become inadequate. They are unable to comprehensively manage issues related to cyber risk, mission-critical applications, and unified communications experience. Essential enterprises are the ones the world and the community cannot live without. To remain essential in the immediate future and beyond, organizations must become unstoppable.
Along with testing the limits of what’s possible, large enterprises also test the limits of what is manageable. This means, there is a requirement for new levels of visibility into their increasingly distributed and complex digital ecosystem. Many a time what most companies call visibility falls short of the data breadth, depth, and intelligence it takes to be unstoppable.
CIOs and CISOs in every organization must raise their expectations of what security, performance, and visibility solutions must do and in what way they have to work together to manage the complexity.
Requirements for an unstoppable enterprise, include,
- Broad network visibility or Enterprise-wide visibility should be an integral part of a broad-based performance and availability strategy that encompasses not only the headquarters, remote offices, and private data centers, but also contact centers, public cloud, and SaaS environments. It should cover legacy and hybrid cloud environments, applications, and all end users — as well as right down to the packet level.
This is important because network packets have the details of a potential breach or network problem and are the ultimate point of convergence between performance and security. - Should be able to conduct real-time, root-cause visibility and automated analysis across any network, any cloud, any data center, or any application, at any time. This is because bad actors have to connect to the organization’s network to gain access to the information they require and it is the network where the attacker is unable to hide.
- The ability to deliver business analytics by leveraging well-structured and highly contextual real-time data is essential. This requirement is critical as millions of users or the critical infrastructure is depending on the organization. Immediate answers are required for timely action.
- Capacity to make even the deepest and broadest data actionable at a massive enterprise scale is very much needed. This helps to proactively identify areas of complexity and fragility to adequately protect service quality and digital user experience.
- Network and security capabilities that can scale with the organization’s growth even up to 100- gigabit networking and beyond are required. The network visibility or security solution must be capable to meet the rate of data growth or it risks becoming obsolete.
Large enterprises today cannot choose between performance and security to be truly unstoppable. They have to be equally secure, innovative, cautious, opportunistic, and as impenetrable as it is open to new ideas. It is very critical for organizations to have the next generation of visibility to achieve unprecedented levels of performance and security by leveraging a robust visibility platform that is capable of delivering it. The platform should be rigorous, uncompromising, and powerful so that enterprises can address network performance and cybersecurity issues before they become problems that stand in the way of these objectives.
The Board members and other stakeholders including customers continue to raise their expectations, compelling an unstoppable enterprise to ensure its digital ecosystem rises to the occasion as well.
(The author is Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT and the views expressed in this article are his)
