The COVID-19 outbreak has dramatically shattered many perceptions. Focus on network transformation for business has suddenly become crucial for many companies to mitigate the impact of the epidemic and stay relevant.

The lockdowns and stay-at-home advisories have further stressed the importance of agile and secure information networks. With a massive uptake of collaboration solutions and burgeoning remote workforce, there has been a pressing need to provide a seamless connectivity experience to every stakeholder and employee.

The digital-first approach has given severe headaches to many CIOs, and IT heads who are consistently evaluating customized solutions to track their extensive network ecosystem.

In the absence of the right network monitoring metrics, IT may feel confronted with identifying the network problem and offer a solution. It ultimately hampers the positive experiences of clients and users. In such a scenario, many technology leaders emphasize deploying tools and technologies to monitor potential vulnerabilities or deficiencies in an organizational network and accelerate their digital network transformation initiatives.

Enabling a more effective remote monitoring

With 5G deployments at the doorway, there’s an exceptional opportunity for enterprises to drive digital innovations at an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless, many of them still struggle to obtain total visibility into varied applications, networks, devices, cloud platforms, and other elements of their IT ecosystem.

Collaboration tools, cloud storage, messaging, and web-conferencing are just a few examples of technologies that enable remote work. Soon, there will be several technologies, such as the internet of things (IoT) and robotic process automation (RPA), which will take on a pivotal part in the enterprise ecosystem and consume additional bandwidth and network capability. These new-age network transformation technologies will also open the pandora box of increased cybersecurity attacks.

Through effective automation enabled network monitoring solutions, organizations can identify demand-supply gaps and vulnerability gaps at regular intervals, thereby getting continuous end-to-end performance visibility across their networks. It will give organizations much-needed speed and nimbleness to augment their value creation flows.

“In the current scenario, technology leaders will continue to evaluate infrastructure, applications, and security for supporting their employees, partners, and customers. Many technology spending priorities are being rationalized from the perspective of the new normal. Focus on digital transformation has been amplified, and enterprises are swiftly turning to automation and analytics to make smarter decisions,” said Sunit Vakharia, Chief Technology Officer, U GRO Capital in an earlier interaction with Better World (See: Sunit Vakharia, Chief Technology Officer, U GRO Capital).

Future scenario

The network monitoring market is witnessing a massive growth worldwide due to the sudden acceleration of digital transformation initiatives by many organizations. Players such as Accedian, Ixia, Juniper Networks, and LiveAction are among the top players ruling the market.

Several industry reports project the market to grow at 12% year-on-year to reach over US $3bn by 2022. The decisive element that will ride the growth stays on business continuity and exceptional customer experience.

“Much focus will soon be on combining detection tools with machine-based cyber threat intelligence. Organizations will strengthen their capabilities to monitor behaviors and applications accessed by employees. Enterprises will continue to revisit their security policies and solutions to reduce risks to IT infrastructure. It is the need of the hour for businesses to consistently evaluate their readiness for supporting remote working as they scale up,” says Chandresh Dedhia, Head of Information Technology, Ascent Health.

The complex and rapidly evolving IT landscape will drive businesses to track network discrepancies and the unique workflow of their scattered workforce. They will be testing and building several network monitoring capabilities to ensure employees can perform their tasks effectively and meet rapidly changing customer expectations.