Optimising performance while maximizing budgets

An Industry Insight by Fluke Networks

In this period of economic uncertainty, Benny Vogels explains how organisations can optimize IT budgets and strengthen service levels.

For IT organisations today, the challenge of being asked to do more with less is thriving. Poor performance of networks and applications can drastically impact the success by adding unnecessary cost, increasing risk because of degradation or downtime and limiting the performance of staff and customers throughout the organisation. A recent survey found that 50 percent of those questioned report that application performance issues are causing lost revenue opportunities. Some indicate there is up to a 9 percent revenue impact from poorly performing applications.

A successful IT organisation will optimise network and application performance while maximising overall resources. Here are some best practices on how IT budgets can be optimised while service quality can be improved at the same time, focusing on some of the key components for service delivery.

Optimising Bandwidth: Instead of just adding bandwidth to solve a performance issue, it makes more sense to take a closer look on what is actually causing the heavy load on the WAN. Understanding if the traffic is business critical, rogue or recreational can reduce the overall cost for an organisation and improve quality by eliminating unnecessary traffic.
Understand impact of applications and network: A bad practice is separating the application and network teams. Network and application performance is not mutually exclusive ¬– they are intertwined. It is very important to understand how apps impact the network and vice versa. 

Improve staff efficiency: For many organisations, a high percentage of time is spent firefighting issues, especially remotely. When IT staff are asked to cut budgets or employees, making the existing IT staff more efficient will have a positive impact on the business. In relation to the second point, closer collaboration between IT teams makes all members a lot more efficient.

Plan for the future: While today’s performance is critical, planning for the future will have a drastic impact on success by reducing the last-minute changes or firefighting problems that could have been avoided.

Fluke Networks has been an industry leader in managing network and application performance for major enterprises worldwide. With the performance management focus, Fluke Networks customers can follow the best practices and greatly improve overall service quality while optimising resources.

A performance management platform should give you the granular visibility to understand how much bandwidth is used at any given time and across every location. In addition, it has to show network operations how the bandwidth is used. Having this information is vital when it comes to optimising bandwidth. It helps to eliminate unwanted traffic from the network or moving high volume processes to non-working hours. IT personnel should leverage trending and reporting to optimise bandwidth – add where needed, and reduce where over-provisioned. 
Since bandwidth usage and application performance are typically closely related, understanding the impact of network usage on applications and vice versa is essential. Therefore, a performance platform should be able to correlate both measurements. This is a paramount in the industry that enables the IT department to really understand root cause of performance issues and improve service quality, not to mention the positive effect on the collaboration between IT teams (network, application, server teams). Imagine the reduction in time to resolution if the problem ownership is immediately clear. This will greatly reduce the mean time to repair and dramatically increase staff efficiency.

To understand the need of future requirements, users must understand the current status of the infrastructure and track trends to where the organisation must grow. The comprehensive view of application and network performance with historical, current and trending views allows organisations to properly plan for the future. By optimising bandwidth resources, improving staff efficiency, and planning for the future, organisations can maximise IT budgets, especially in these difficult economic times. Make sure that your company is part of the 50 percent, not suffering up to 9 percent revenue loss due to IT performance issues. Optimise performance while maximising budgets.

Benny Vogels is the European Marketing Manager for the performance management solutions at Fluke Networks EMEA. Vogels has been with Fluke Networks since 1997. Prior to this, he worked in software development and network management. Based in Egelsbach, Germany, Vogels has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry.