By Vinay Sharma

With remote and hybrid work as the new reality, the traditional enterprise network, which is fortified by corporate firewalls, has increasingly shifted its reliance on the Internet. However, the internet is an unpredictable environment that is vulnerable to performance degradation and outages.

Challenges that lead to outages and performance issues

To support remote and hybrid work, enterprises are increasingly moving resources to the edge. Network traffic is now moving from one edge domain to another: wireless to wired connections, local area network (LAN) to WAN, internet service provider (ISP) to virtual private networks (VPN) to content delivery network (CDN) providers, and cloud to server workloads. These edges can become roadblocks to productivity when bandwidth, packet flow, and utilization challenges cause performance degradation incidents or outright outages. Navigating the global topology of the modern enterprise network requires visibility without borders for enhanced application performance and assuring positive user experience. When outage or performance incidents occur, critical business services can grind to a halt or there may be prolonged periods of performance degradation for employees and customers that can be global or localized. Troubleshooting issues impacting cloud migrations and modern applications are complicated by the virtually infinite number of potential issues across a multivendor environment.

Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study

NETSCOUT™ commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying nGenius Enterprise Performance Management. The purpose of this study was to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of nGenius Enterprise Performance Management on their organizations. The analysis also assumes the complementary deployment of the nGeniusPULSE active monitoring platform. For the purposes of this study, Forrester used the results of interviews with decision-makers and influencers from four organizations that had experience using nGenius Enterprise Performance Management and combined them into the results for a single composite organization, to represent the interviewed customers' experiences. The objective of the framework was to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Prior to using nGenius Enterprise Performance Management, these organizations were leveraging legacy solutions that yielded limited success during outages and performance degradation incidents. This often led to lengthy war room meetings with unproductive finger-pointing and a lack of accountability. These limitations led to longer periods of downtime, an inability to quickly determine root causes for these incidents, potential loss of revenue, and inefficient use of NetOps and IT ops resources. NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution enables networking operations (NetOps) and information technology operations (IT ops) professionals (collectively, I & O teams) to work together and quickly identify the source of outages and critical performance degradation incidents. This is the mean time to knowledge (MTTK): pointing these professionals in the right direction to quickly isolate and identify the source of the problem.

KEY FINDINGS

The NETSCOUT solution enabled the interviewees' organizations to monitor the performance of the network, applications, and services proactively and holistically, resulting in much faster mean time to identification (MTTI) for outages and critical performance degradation incidents.

Quantified benefits:

Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• An increase of 7.5% in revenue productivity for customer-facing agents
• USD 1.9 million in recouped cost of downtime from outage
• An increase of 6.1% in productivity for non-revenue-generating employees.
• A reduction of more than 80% in-person hours on incident management across I&O teams

Unquantified benefits:

Benefits that provide value for the interviewees but are not quantified in this study include:

• Proactive monitoring to reduce performance degradation incidents
• Mission-critical and lifesaving benefits
• Stellar post-sales support
• Enhanced employee experience

NETSCOUT Value revealed by Forrester TEI: Three-year risk-adjusted

• Revenue Assurance for customer-facing agents – USD 2.6 million
• Improved productivity for non-revenue-generating employees – USD 1.7 million
• Reduced outage downtime – USD 1.9 million
• Improved IT Ops and NetOps productivity by USD 818,000
• NPV – USD 4.86 million
• ROI – 234%
• Payback < 6 months

More importantly, the study demonstrated that organizations that invested in best practices for proactive network and application performance management leveraging packet-based, real-time analysis were able to overcome the troubleshooting challenges of today's complex enterprise environments.

-The Author is Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT