Security Featured Article

Today’s IT organizations put an increasing emphasis on managing and monitoring the performance of their networks. The importance of network performance monitoring and management remains on the rise even during these tough economic times.

 

The level of quality at which a network operates and executes all the necessary requirements is referred to as “network performance.” Enterprise and Service Providers’ networks become more complex every day and continue to increase in size. Tighter network security requirements and a spike in wireless deployments raise the importance of monitoring and managing wireless networks as well.

 

With fixed-mobile convergence taking place despite the economic downturn, networks are becoming increasingly complex. Because of increasing network complexity, there is a need for effective network performance monitoring and management solutions.

 

Historically, the focus on network performance management was strictly based on the network in general and also on network components such as routers and switches. Lately, this focus is shifting toward network and application performance monitoring. Due to bandwidth-hungry applications such as IP Video and wireless, the need for quality of end-user experience is more important today than it ever was.

 

There is a demand coming from enterprise market for a converged network monitoring and management solution. Since enterprises’ budgets are limited and they prefer to do as many things as possible with the same equipment, there is a trend toward integrated solution sets. A number of vendors offer solutions that provide overall network analysis as well as detailed analysis of each application flow and even packet, if needed.

 

Currently, there is a growing trend toward active network monitoring as opposed to passive collection of data that does not provide metrics or actual validation of application performance. The network performance monitoring and management solutions market has started to deliver a more comprehensive and intuitive set of information.

 

Network monitoring and management is becoming increasingly application-aware. Rather than focusing on separate network elements and ensuring that they are working properly, network managers are required to understand how the network impacts the performance of each application. With IP Video and VoIP applications present on the network, network performance monitoring and management products are expected to measure and analyze quality of end-user experience and drill into the root of a variety of network performance impairments.

 

Increasing bandwidth requirements and the rapid increase in network traffic volume challenge the growth of the network performance monitoring and management solutions market for enterprises. With the introduction of next-generation services, bandwidth requirements are on the rise. VoIP does not take a significant amount of bandwidth compared to IP Video, whose use continues to emerge in the enterprise. All the new applications that next-generation services introduced to this market create challenges for enterprises. They must keep up with the bandwidth in number of transactions in different applications that are happening in the network simultaneously and must be able to scale.

 

Network security concerns continue to hinder the growth of the world’s network performance monitoring and management solutions markets. The increase in Internet usage leads to an increase in security fears among end-users. Concerns regarding the Internet’s vulnerability and the possibility of information leakage persist. The availability of a reliable security measure remains a challenge for vendors – how to produce a safe and trouble-free environment for end-users?

 

The network has become increasingly important to businesses. Increased dependency on a company’s ability to communicate with employees, customers and partners challenges the market. Connectedness has never been more important. Whether it’s Web application, IP telephony, e-mail, B2B integration or any other way, people are staying connected globally. It has become crucial to more enterprises, large and small, to stay connected. Network impairments usually translate into lost revenues for financial services and public and private companies a like.

 

The global economic environment directly impacts IT spending. Since IT spending is expected to decrease from 2008 to 2009, it will have a negative impact on the network performance monitoring and management market. There is a shortage of IT professionals that fully understand these technologies. Sufficient and appropriate knowledge of new and existing technologies is necessary during the buying process because it’s needed to understand how the network performance monitoring and management products work.

 

Companies are extremely cautious about spending money. Yet network performance monitoring and management tools can be viewed as an easy win if they offer fast ROI. In order to win in this difficult economic situation, solutions must be cost-effective and must solve real pain points with practical solutions. If a network performance monitoring tool is not focused on providing a transformational value proposition, but instead offers a practical and pragmatic value coupled with fast and practical ROI, it will succeed even in this down economy.