the data avalanche challenge within digital transformation

66 Pages·2016·10.01 MB·English

| BLOG |
THE DATA AVALANCHE
CHALLENGE WITHIN DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
THE DATA AVALANCHE
Recently, an IBM study revealed that 90% of all the world’s data has been generated within
the past two years.
This data avalanche is at the heart of the digital transformation, caused by new technologies
that are reshaping the customer experience. Digital Transformation (DX) is the industry shift
from relying on physical assets to predominantly utilizing information and digital assets in the
corporate value chain, allowing companies to redefine the customer experience, operational
processes, and business models.
HAVING SO MUCH DATA CAN PRODUCE
POTENTIAL POINTS OF FAILURE OR
BOTTLENECKS, MAKING THE NEED TO
GAIN DEEP INSIGHTS INTO YOUR NETWORK
AND APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT
CRITICALLY IMPORTANT
NETSCOUT addresses the data challenge by enabling CTOs, CIOs, and entire IT organizations
to examine all networking elements, servers, databases, and applications to gain actionable
performance-monitoring insights. This is the intelligence that is critically needed to achieve
service assurance and security on the road to successful digital transformation success.
NETSCOUT solutions can convert unstructured data from disparate sources into coherent
and actionable intelligence. Through continuous monitoring, NETSCOUT solutions generate
highly scalable metadata that enables a comprehensive, real-time, and historic view of service,
network, application, and server performance. This visibility provides the business with critical
and timely feedback on the performance and usage of its services.
NETSCOUT’s Intelligent Data Sources, the Utilizing real-time data collection and
InfiniStream appliances, offer an affordable analysis, NETSCOUT can be used as a
instrumentation that extends to virtual private new source of competitive advantage
clouds whether implemented in house or in the and business agility that includes, among
public cloud.
SERVICE
Even though 90% of the world’s data may
DEPENDENCY
have been generated over just the past two
years, with NETSCOUT, organizations can MAPPING
still successfully embark on their DX journey.

NETSCOUT tools provide the insights necessary
to create and maintain the twin pillars of CAPACITY
innovation and service assurance historically
PLANNING
required by successful enterprises. And it can do
so regardless of the current digital storm or the
complexity data escalation adds. Let the digital
PERFORMANCE
winds blow safely with the knowledge that
NETSCOUT-protected enterprises will continue MONITORING
to enable innovation, while their products are
served up to users without interruption.
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Insight Into Everything:
The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform
for Digital Transformation
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper
Prepared for NETSCOUT
June 2016
IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Insight Into Everything: The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform for Digital Transformation
Table of Contents
Executive Summary .........................................................................................................................................1
Digital Transformation Cannot Be Ignored .....................................................................................................1
The Digital Transformation Journey ................................................................................................................2
Digital Transformation Requires a Business Assurance Platform That Provides Insight Into Everything .........2
Big Data and Business Intelligence: Critical Enablers of Digital Business Assurance .......................................3
Assuring Digital Transformation in the Financial Services and Health Care Industries ....................................4
EMA Perspective ..............................................................................................................................................5
©2016 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
Insight Into Everything: The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform for Digital Transformation
Executive Summary
Digital transformation isn’t about enterprises finding a way to replicate the success of disruptive startups.
In a rapidly changing economy, innovation trumps imitation. Enterprises that have been disrupted
should move past the upstarts by innovating new business models. These new business models will
require continuous development of new applications and services and a digital infrastructure that is
agile enough to support them.
As enterprises embark on a digital transformation journey, they need a business assurance platform
that provides IT with insight into the current state of their infrastructure, helps them plan their
transformation journey, and gives them the analytics and intelligence they need to understand the
health and performance of the new applications they roll out to support their transformation efforts.
Digital Transformation Cannot Be Ignored
Enterprises are dealing with a new set of rules in today’s business environment. Many customers
expect fast, ubiquitous, and personalized access to data, products, and services. Rather than call a
taxi, they want a smartphone app that provides instant insight into the nearest and most affordable
ride. Instead of visiting a bank branch, they want to deposit a check by snapping a photograph of it
with their mobile device. Enterprises need to deliver on these requirements with agility and precision,
which requires rapid innovation of business models that can be delivered to the market quickly, cost-
effectively, and reliably.
However, digital transformation isn’t about established enterprises emulating the business models of
digital disrupters. The hospitality industry, for instance, shouldn’t try to replicate Airbnb, and the
transportation industry shouldn’t try to replicate Uber. Such tactical responses are signs of companies
that are following, rather than innovating. Instead, companies should look beyond these competitors
to innovate new business models that force companies like Uber and Airbnb to respond to them. For
instance, General Motors has partnered with Uber competitor Lyft. The two companies are not just
trying to compete head to head with Uber but rather are co-developing self-driving cars that could
disrupt the transportation industry more fundamentally than Uber has. In a hospitality market disrupted
by Airbnb, Marriott International isn’t pitting its hotel rooms against the houses and apartments that
Airbnb brokers. Instead, it is investing in social media, digital content, and employee collaboration
technology to transform its customer experience and marketing operations.
These innovations are driven by technology, which means that successful digital transformation
is contingent upon high-performing and highly available digital infrastructure, especially networks
and application infrastructure. A long and ongoing journey, this transformation requires a business
assurance platform with the deep visibility and analytics that allow an enterprise to know where it is in
its digital transformation journey and where it is going.
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Insight Into Everything: The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform for Digital Transformation
The Digital Transformation Journey
There is no generic blueprint for digital transformation. However, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT
ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) research has found that the most successful digital transformation campaigns
are characterized by a partnership between IT and the business.1
Enterprises need to innovate with new business models that are based on elasticity, rapid scalability,
and low initial investments. But they must conduct this innovation in partnership with IT, since these
new business models require new applications. And these applications, in turn, require supporting
infrastructure. With digital transformation, enterprises must increase their velocity not just in
business model innovation and application and digital services development, but also in operations
as the operations organization will support these applications and services in production. IT must be
prepared to enable a variety of technologies that support transformation, including cloud/SaaS, big
data analytics, unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), the Internet of Things, mobility,
and social media.
EMA’s digital transformation research has determined that IT organizations need to be more dynamic,
transparent, and service aware during their transformation journeys. They must be more responsive to
changing business needs. They must be able to demonstrate to the business how they are delivering
value. They must also have a deep understanding of, and visibility into business and customer needs.
A key starting point is a “GPS” system that provides a global view of digital assets, more specifically a
business assurance platform that gives IT insight into everything. By collecting and analyzing a broad
set of data from infrastructure, the business assurance platform should be able to understand the
current state of a company’s digital assets and how those assets will behave and perform when tasked
with supporting new digital business models and their enabling technologies. Finally, such a platform
must offer IT a roadmap on how to successfully move from its current state to its digitally transformed
future state.
Digital Transformation Requires a Business Assurance
Platform That Provides Insight Into Everything
Digital transformation is characterized by high-velocity change in complex environments where legacy
infrastructure and new infrastructure combine to support continuously changing business models. This
transformation might also occur at a large scale, including global organizations with tens of thousands
of employees, hundreds of sites, and thousands of devices. Without a business assurance platform that
can provide insight into all these variables, chaos can reign.
A digital business assurance platform should be able to make sense of this complexity, first by using big
data techniques to passively collect, organize, analyze, and visualize all data crossing the network within
the organization’s digital infrastructure. The platform must be able to scale its data collection and
analysis to support digital transformation regardless of the size of the company and its infrastructure.
The business assurance platform should understand the service interdependencies represented in the
data it collects and analyzes and use that intelligence to create structured metadata. This metadata
should then be presented in a customizable business intelligence environment that both IT operations
and business stakeholders can use to understand the health and performance of digital services. This
platform should also extend the analysis of metadata to provide if/then analysis for new digital services
as they are introduced.
1 EMA, “Digital and IT Transformation: A Global View of Trends and Requirements,” September 2015.
Page 2
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Insight Into Everything: The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform for Digital Transformation
Such an assurance platform serves three critical functions in digital transformation. It provides an
organization with a current state audit of the applications and infrastructure that support today’s
business models. It supports the engineering and capacity planning processes that IT will execute to
support the transformation journey. Finally, as enterprises roll new applications into production to
support new business models, a digital business assurance platform provides visibility into the health
and performance of those applications.
According to EMA research, organizations that are pursuing digital and IT transformation projects
have identified two top functional technology priorities for the next 12 months. First, 51% have
identified that they must improve customer and user experience, and 45% said they need to improve
application performance management. As mentioned before, a business assurance platform can
support both of these priorities by providing visibility into the health and performance of new digital
business applications.
Thirty-two percent (32%) of transforming enterprises said they are currently partnering with IT
operations management software vendors to support their transformation initiatives. EMA also asked
these enterprises to identify the key external partner that would be most relevant to supporting their
transformation initiatives going forward. “IT operations management software vendors” was the number
two response, trailing only “application management software vendors.” Finally, EMA research found
that “service performance and availability-related metrics” (31%) was the most important operational
metric enterprises were using to measure digital transformation success. IT operations management
vendors are the leading providers of digital business assurance platforms, and they typically provide
deep visibility into service performance and availability-related metrics.
This research indicates that a business assurance platform with the analytical capabilities to track user
experience, application performance, and service dependencies will lower the risks of an organization’s
digital transformation journey. This platform will also help the organization understand its progress.
Big Data and Business Intelligence: Critical Enablers of
Digital Business Assurance
The business assurance platform for a digital transformation initiative must have the big data ability to
collect, organize, analyze, and visualize large volumes of traffic data flowing over the network at high
velocity and to correlate it with secondary data sources, such as NetFlow, SNMP, log files, and synthetic
transactions, to provide an accurate, real-time view of the health and performance of digital services.
The platform must also leverage business intelligence technology to present this analysis with service
contexts, beginning with a dashboard and reporting interface that can inform IT and business
operations of the current state of the digital enterprise, including network utilization, application usage,
and service dependencies. It should also enable the digital transformation team to quickly detect and
troubleshoot service delivery anomalies.
The business intelligence console of the service assurance platform should offer a holistic view of the
entire physical and virtual service delivery infrastructure with a dependency map that visualizes all
the interdependencies among service elements and the client communities that consume these digital
services. This console should allow IT organizations to track their progress as applications for new
business models roll out.
Page 3
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Insight Into Everything: The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform for Digital Transformation
Assuring Digital Transformation in the Financial Services
and Health Care Industries
Regardless of the industry in which it competes, an enterprise will depend on its business assurance
platform to successfully navigate digital transformation. Two industries in particular—financial services
and health care—have very precisely defined requirements for digital business assurance.
Given that consumers expect instant access to highly available and high-performing digital financial
services, financial companies need business intelligence consoles that provide end-to-end operational
insight into how consumers are experiencing digital channels and services. These organizations must be
able to assure user experience via real-time, actionable business intelligence while simultaneously enabling
new technologies that support their digital transformation, including IoT and artificial intelligence.
Financial companies also need to support other initiatives with the business intelligence capabilities of
their digital business assurance platform, such as data mining, online analytical processing, querying,
and reporting. This will require the conversion of large volumes of unstructured information that is
continuously monitored and analyzed in real time.
Like the financial services industry, the health care industry is transforming to serve consumers, in this
case re-aligning services and operations to support patients who have become proactive, value-seeking
consumers who demand instant, trouble-free health care information, day or night.
The health care industry also faces two unique challenges. Many of its services are mission critical, and
the infrastructure team is tasked with monitoring industry-specific standard protocol transactions, such
as EHR HL-7, and compliance with regulatory requirements such as HIPPA. Scalability, too, will be
a growing concern as health care organizations seek to leverage IoT, mobility, and big data analytics.
Health care organizations can address these challenges with business assurance platforms that have
big data capabilities, which can collect, normalize and analyze traffic data and secondary data sources
including network flows, logs, and synthetic transactions. This analysis can enable IT operations
to assure patient experience while also monitoring the unique requirements of a health care digital
transformation initiative.
A key component of the business assurance process is that it must process large volumes of structured
metadata for real-time as well as back-in-time analytics purposes. This information is vital in complying
with health care mandates such as the Affordable Care Act and HIPPA regulations.
It’s a challenge to conquer the inherent chaos brought about by digital transformation within the
service-delivery chain of health care organizations, financial services companies, and enterprises in
many other industries. Full visibility across all applications, networks, service enablers, servers, and
databases is only becoming more important.
Page 4
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Insight Into Everything: The Criticality of a
Business Assurance Platform for Digital Transformation
EMA Perspective
Digital transformation is about innovating and enabling new business models in almost real time.
EMA research has found that the most successful transformation initiatives are partnerships between
the IT organization and business stakeholders. As the business creates new business models, the IT
organization needs to provide infrastructure and business assurance platforms to support the agile
development and deployment of new applications that enable those new business models.
EMA research has shown that performance management and infrastructure operations software are
key enablers of digital transformation success. They are foundational elements of a business assurance
platform that can provide IT operations and business stakeholders with insight into every step of the
digital transformation journey, from its current state to a future state of continuous innovation. With
the right service assurance platform, IT operations can be a successful partner to the business in any
transformation initiative.
About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum
of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices,
and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help EMA’s clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research,
analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or
blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission
of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change
without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. “EMA” and
“Enterprise Management Associates” are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
©2016 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. EMA™, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®, and the
mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
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Page 5
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| ARTICLE |
RAPID SERVICE TRIAGE
PAYS OFF BIG TIME
Edison Group Technology Spotlight
TROUBLE IS INEVITABLE, EXPENSIVE
Rapid service triage is the key to both defending the
corporation’s reputation and stemming the losses
from those incidents.
Things can go wrong anywhere along the service
delivery path that includes the cloud and modern
data centers. Business services like Microsoft
Exchange, Oracle, and Unified Communications
can suffer disruptions. When service degradations
hit users and customers, the difference between
lost revenues and a rapid resolution is having the
right service assurance solution. Today, migrating to
complex virtual environments only complicates the
challenges. The benefits afforded by virtualization
are balanced against the potential for service
performance problems, impacting the bottom line
when (not if) trouble strikes critical applications,
systems, and network resources.
Traditional network and application
performance-monitoring approaches are slow
and very costly, as each component that enables
service delivery is scrutinized singularly, lacking big-
picture, network-wide visibility. IT teams use manual
correlation of disparate data sets and indicators,
sifting through multiple theories to find the root
cause of a performance problem, which leads to
finger-pointing and excessive time spent in the war
room.