In my interaction with a customer, he complained about the rising number of network, infrastructure, and application issues while working remotely. He referred to his current persisting issue with their enterprise collaboration tool, and upon calling his infrastructure support team, he was being informed about the probable reasons why this happened. He dryly remarked to me: “I don’t wish to get into the nitty-gritty of why the app is not running. I just want these problems to be resolved – fast and easy.”
Sounds familiar? I guess so. Most professionals wish to leverage communication and collaboration technologies to perform their core functions; they are not keen on understanding the underlying technologies. More so in the new normal of remote working, where we place a premium on business continuity.
Is your infrastructure support team struggling to provide frictionless access to your distributed and remote workforce? In the technology stack, the limelight is hogged by the uppermost layer, applications, where value creation happens. The infrastructure, atop whose foundation the entire stack rests is the least focussed. Unless it’s a time of peak utility or a panic-inducing calamity, which is where we currently are.
What we need is the smooth functioning of all enterprise applications, devices, and the infrastructure supporting it. The key is to enable integrated monitoring and management of your applications and infrastructure – like our next-gen Virtual Command Center (VCC).
Moreover, a siloed collaboration between Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) is inadequate to be future-fit. The next normal requires businesses to virtualize and integrate the NOC and SOC.
Based on my experiences and customer interactions, I share the 7 key reasons why businesses must adopt a VCC solution.
- VCC is complex, but not a black box
The driving factors of the VCC solution and the way it works is undoubtedly complex, but explainable. It’s like a central engine where the intelligence from across the organization is continuously collected and analyzed. The insights derived provide threat intelligence and situational awareness. You can tune its functioning with your organization’s goals.
We are witnessing successful adoption across verticals and market segments (enterprise and mid-market) to overcome anxiety brought about by unpredictable disruptions. Now, more than ever before, you need to continuously oversee the health of your network to empower employees to ensure business continuity.
- Harness real-time analysis:
With enterprise IT assets monitored in real-time, there’s a tab on data, network resources, communication tools, devices, servers, and infrastructure. All reflected and operated from live dashboards. The enterprise-wide visibility eliminates the need to cater to each issue individually, and instead provisions troubleshooting at the root cause level.
Integrating SOC with NOC enables you to detect anomalies and vulnerabilities even before they escalate into an issue. Combining these helps you mobilize response teams faster and empowers you to respond to them proactively and promptly.
- Leverage strong incident management:
As they say, you don’t dig well when your house is on fire. It helps to create a priority ranking and escalation pipeline before the storm hits you. By establishing the processes and procedures to deal with incidents, recurring and unforeseen, your organization can respond in a thoughtful manner, instead of reacting spontaneously.
- Build trust and transparency
A virtualized and integrated NOC-SOC provides for a higher level of visibility and enforcement of service level agreements (SLAs). Visualizing data and reports through easy-to-grasp graphical representation of alerts, indicators, and patterns provide a solid foundation to quickly investigate issues and record them for reference.
- Reduce MTTR:
Leveraging automation and new-age tech will help you reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). VCC helps you rise above the fragmented workflows, unactionable alerts, data overload, and insights scarcity. It enables you to rise above the pervasive noise to detect patterns as they emerge and proactively respond to it.
- Manage remote and branch offices effectively:
The next-gen VCC needs to be acclimatized to the new normal of work from anywhere, all-digital environment. The confluence of data streams from across the organization and locations empowers both the organization and the employees to make data-driven decisions. As a result, your organization is fully capable of containing internal ripples even as your customers experience operational continuity.
- Leverage AIOps:
The conventional systems and technologies are inadequate to meet the staggering strain on infrastructure due to the overnight shift to working remotely.
AIOps enables you to automate IT operations, including correlating events, discovering anomalies, and establishing causality. It enables you to reduce repetitive tasks and concentrate on adding value to your offerings. It forms the basis for building a VCC that is self-aware and self-healing.
For more information, you can watch our webinar on the next-gen Virtual Command Center.
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