Even well before the pandemic, organisations at the forefront of digital innovation were utilising technology and deploying the expertise of their IT experts to build competitive advantage. Now, many enterprises are reconsidering traditional technology spending strategies. New ‘COVID budgets’ are allowing for more capital allocation, and this has given CIOs the power to become agents of change, leading their organisations to become technology early adopters.  

The pandemic has taught technology leaders how to very quickly balance immediate needs with a future-focused in a time of transformational change. To maintain business continuity, these organisations have adopted digital workflows to enable remote working, optimise business operations and enable innovation to meet the needs of a new market. Many of these changes will be permanent, and will continue to influence tech budgets in the years to come.  

For instance, some organisations are looking at re-apportioning parts of their commercial property and office operation budgets to technologies that enable home working or support remote workers better. It’s still unclear how the situation will be when lockdowns end and, although many are expected to return to traditional workplaces, a large proportion will not or will, at least, pursue some form of hybrid working. 

The ensuing refocusing of spending strategies in areas including automation, cloud migration, security and preventative measures, is seeing organisations direct technology budgets towards aggressive digital transformation and a technology-driven future. Traditionally, industries use the benchmark of IT spending as a percentage of revenue. Up until now, the average IT department typically invested more than half of its technology budget in maintaining business operations, and only around 19% on creating innovative new technological capabilities.  

One area where large enterprises are finding true value, is implementing third party monitoring tools. Monitoring, troubleshooting and performance management solutions should be an integral part of a company’s IT strategy.  

Without the tools to clearly see what’s going on in what is already a complex environment – and will only become more so – businesses don’t have the necessary insurance policy to deliver on their budget expectations. 

CIOs realise the need for monitoring and performance management of an organisation’s technology stack is more important than ever. They know they need complete visibility into how the network architecture is laid out. With the continuous addition of new applications, devices and communication platforms, the likelihood of outages, sub-par user experience and downtime is high. This comes at great cost to a company’s bottom line.   

To enable this, third party monitoring tools are required to give a deep insight into the health of an entire network given all these variables. Reactive troubleshooting is no longer going to be sufficient so organisations are turning to third party monitoring in order to see potential network issues in real time, before users are affected. Proactive monitoring reveals detailed analytics such a key performance indicators (KPIs) for every device and application on a network.  

Finally, security issues are a real concern, and in many cases, can potentially derail an entire organisation. Complete visibility into your network gives you detailed data and information that can pre-emptively eliminate potential risks.  

CIOs and IT teams don’t need analyst figures or estimates to prove the importance of monitoring. Instead, they can look at the local figures like the costs of IT staffing, the average time it takes to restore failures, the number of previous network failures, and service level agreements (SLAs) with various service providers. These are the hard numbers.  

If tech leaders are truly going to become change instigators, common-sense thinking suggests that you live or die by the implementation of root cause analysis. After all, you can’t fix what you can’t see.  

 

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3cVPczN