Hidden Gems: Harnessing the Power of the Network to Proactively Ensure Edge Success

There is no doubt that where people perform their jobs has received a great deal of attention over the last five years. Certainly, the focus initially was driven by the COVID pandemic and the safety necessary for employees and customers during this challenging period. Among the many adjustments of the time was to accelerate digital transformations—particularly to migrate to cloud-based alternatives to make access and use easier for highly distributed workforces. Since many organizations have made the jump to cloud-based services, another aspect that has gained attention has been ensuring the quality of user experience with cloud-based services, particularly for employees at the business edge in remote locations.

Working in Remote Offices

Some industries—the medical field, critical manufacturing plants, retailers such as groceries and pharmacies, and energy plants, for example—never stopped needing employees on premises. Digital transformations in remote locations for these industries involved the evolution of edge architectures, which included adding computing capacity and data storage closer to where the data is being used—that is, at the remote locations. This has several benefits, including fewer latency issues for users as well as security and resilience improvements by reducing traffic volumes as a result of not sending sensitive data out of the local network.

As more employees have returned to remote, regional, and even headquarters offices, the value of user experience, performance, and security at these locations has become a priority. In his recent ebook “Hidden Gems: Harnessing the Power of the Network to Proactively Ensure Edge Success,”  Jim Frey, principal analyst for Enterprise Networking at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), discusses a breadth of critical application services that are performed at some of these locations, including data management, supply chain and logistics, monitoring and automation, cybersecurity, and customer experience optimization, to name just a few.

Importance of Network Performance for Remote Employees

Performance and security of these applications and services for the employees at these locations are critically important to productivity, revenue, cost containment, and customer service and experience. Ensuring success with these services can present several challenges—some common to all enterprises, and others unique to individual industries. The ESG ebook covers many of these concepts and provides useful ideas for overcoming observability challenges to help achieve performance, availability, and security goals in remote locations.

Valuable topics covered in this ebook include:

• The importance of observability data for more than performance management, such as for security and artificial intelligence (AI) purposes
• Rationale for moving from reactive to proactive observability practices
• Quantifiable justifications for implementing observability strategies in remote offices

Learn more about ensuring success at the business edges in the ESG ebook “Hidden Gems: Harnessing the Power of the Network to Proactively Ensure Edge Success.”