How IT Can Deliver Better Business Outcomes

Cloud services, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and on-premises infrastructures connected by wired and wireless networks now represent the backbone of modern enterprises. To fully harness the benefits of modern network architectures, network operations teams need a deep understanding of how these systems perform. This visibility is essential if teams are to avoid the downtime that results in lost revenues.

To be successful, teams must enhance their operational awareness and gain comprehensive visibility into the performance of both internal networks and those managed by third parties. Even by making small advances in this IT arena, teams can deliver large business benefits and demonstrable return on investment (ROI). 

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Fig 1. Following a maturity model enables IT teams to take achievable steps toward expanding their operational visibility

Eliminating Redundant Network Monitoring Software Yields $1M in Cost Reductions

To move from basic visibility to proactive network operations, teams must meet the following objectives:

• Establishing unified contextual awareness across network inventory, alarms, events, fault, performance, flows, logs, and configurations for traditional network architectures.
• Retiring redundant toolsets and establishing one source of truth for data collection and correlation across multi-vendor technologies.
• Instituting advanced capacity planning and insights into how bandwidth consumption affects user experiences.

Over the years, teams have invested in capabilities for monitoring complex networks that connect employees to a mix of enterprise applications, public cloud environments, and SaaS applications. The end result has been tool sprawl, which costs companies an average of $2.5 million per year. By following a maturity model that advances IT awareness in complex network architectures delivering critical user experience, businesses can expect a 50% reduction in costs over three years, delivering savings of more than $1M.

Avoiding Downtime Yields $2.5M in Revenue Savings

To move from proactive operations to modern observability, teams must establish awareness of modern network technologies like SD-WAN. However, gaining this visibility can’t mean adding more tools to your environment. Today’s teams need tool vendors that offer add-on capabilities, so they can use their current monitoring processes and workflows and apply them to these complex, modern network technologies. This guarantees that teams don’t have to deploy, learn, and administer new tools. Plus, it means teams can more easily apply the operational expertise they already have to the software-defined networking space.

By following these steps, teams can discover opportunities for avoiding downtime. This downtime avoidance can lead to improved network availability for critical business services, which can provide revenue savings of up to $2.5 million over three years.

Realizing an ROI of 160%

The holy grail for network operations is to move from modern observability to experience-driven network observability. Achieving these capabilities requires establishing advanced visibility into the experience of network users.

Research shows that, when following this maturity model for advancing network monitoring capabilities, organizations typically invest around $2.6 million. These investments can deliver business benefits amounting to $6.8 million over three years, resulting in a net present value (NPV) of $4.2 million and an ROI of 160%.

As companies invest in network innovations to support changing business needs, teams need to make commensurate investments in tools to manage their modern environments. However, it’s vital that these investments enable teams to establish unified visibility, including of both legacy and new technologies, and of both networks that are managed internally as well as those managed by external vendors. By leveraging these capabilities, teams can reduce downtime and costs.

Many business leaders still view IT as a cost center, rather than a strategic partner. By delivering significant business outcomes, including sizable cost savings and ROI, IT teams can fundamentally and permanently change this perception.

To learn more, visit Broadcom.