Network Performance
Optimize network performance
Today’s management and monitoring
tools can help prevent costly downtime.
by Steve Wong
The character of an enterprise network, as
well as the sophistication of available
network-analysis tools, has changed
radically since the first use of Ethernet.
Today, companies use the Internet for
disseminating information and for
e-commerce, affecting the amount of
resources a corporation devotes to its
network, as well as the importance the
organization places on keeping its network
running properly.
Along with the growth of network usage,
there has been a corresponding increase in
the availability of network-analysis and
management tools. This is seen in the
fragmented nature of the network-management
industry; freeware analyzers,
enterprise-class appliances and everything
that falls in between are each jockeying for
a place in the IT manager’s tool kit.
An organization should ensure that the
network analyzer it has chosen can see what
is happening on most of the seven layers of
the OSI network model.
Yet, enterprise networks are more complex
today than ever, and the data these networks
transport has expanded to include peer to
peer, voice over IP (VoIP), storage,
Internet and a myriad of other applications.
The mean-time-to-resolution measurement (how
long is necessary to fix a networking
problem once it has occurred), a key
statistic used by some organizations, has
remained essentially unchanged, however.
There are online cost calculators that
help estimate what an hour’s worth of
network downtime might cost an organization.
Typical considerations include lost
productivity, missed sales opportunities and
the possibility of losing an important
customer account.
One estimate puts the cost of downtime at
about $42,000 an hour for an average large
business. Thus, if a business’ network
availability was 99 percent for the entire
year, it would still have experienced three
days of downtime; this works out to a cost
of more than $3 million.
In order to prevent these problems from
occurring in the first place, corporate
management should decide what specific tools
are required and how much of the IT budget
should be spent on equipment such as network
tools. For example, an organization might
budget 3 percent of the cost of its network
infrastructure to tools meant for network
management. The amount of gear required
would depend specifically on how elaborate a
network it has, and how critical the
performance is on each network segment.
To make intelligent choices,
organizations need to look for certain
qualities in the equipment they purchase:
ease of use, application-layer awareness,
scalability and long-term capture
capability.
Look for a network analyzer that has an
intuitive user interface that highlights
network problems in a way that requires
little expertise to recognize. Color-coded
icons, for example, might indicate the
severity of a condition that might adversely
affect network performance or cause loss of
data.
The ability to issue alerts via e-mail or
pager, or to run scripts to fix a problem is
also an important feature.
An organization should be sure the
network analyzer can see what is happening
on most of the seven layers of the OSI
network model, and particularly at the
application layer. Research has consistently
shown that application failures are one of
the key causes of network outages; yet
problems at this layer are also more
difficult to troubleshoot because of the
protocol complexity found at this layer.
Legacy products from just a few years ago
are typically not application aware and lack
the capability to see and troubleshoot what
is today a critically important area.
If an organization has only a simple
network with a few segments, a network
analyzer program installed on a portable
computer may be all it needs. On the other
hand, an organization with many network
segments, especially with some in remote
locations, may require an analyzer that has
a distributed architecture with agents that
can run unattended and be accessed and
controlled from a single central console.
If the network has mission-critical
segments, an organization may want to
consider a network-capture appliance that is
able to capture and store network data over
periods of days or months, without losing
any packets. This is useful for diagnosing
problems that are intermittent in nature. It
can also help to spot times when network
utilization spikes during hours when no one
is watching.
A few years ago, the use of a protocol
analyzer was considered an IT best practice.
Today, protocol analyzers often are used in
conjunction with a network-capture
appliance.
If an organization is planning to use the
network for voice or video transmission, it
should look for a feature that will display
quality metrics such as mean opinion score
and jitter/latency values to help
characterize VoIP quality. Features such as
the ability to listen into a VoIP call are
also key capabilities available in some
high-end solutions.
Another useful capability is the ability
to perform service-level agreement tests.
These allow an organization to determine
whether a problem resides in its own
network, or whether it results from a
provider that is not delivering the quality
of service that it is paying for.
Even though corporate networks are more
extensive and more complex than ever before,
an organization can keep its network in good
health more easily today. An investment in
network-monitoring and management solutions
can reduce the organization’s total network
operating cost and the risks that might
otherwise arise from poor network
performance.
Steve Wong is vice president of
marketing for
ClearSight Networks, Fremont, Calif.
For more information
(click here)
The virtual contact center
by Rex Dorricott
The pressure to provide 24/7 access to
customer service, across multiple languages
and time zones, has created contact center
hot spots in regions such as India, the
Philippines, the Caribbean and South
America. At the same time, the need to serve
a variety of time zones and geographies
means that a company may be working with an
outsourcer that provides contact center
support in several locations at once–and
these centers may have little contact among
them, leading to potential challenges when
managing customer information.
This is particularly true for businesses
whose customers may have different needs,
but all contact the same centers for service
and support. Understanding which category a
customer falls into, and being able to
respond appropriately, whether that
customer’s call is answered in Manila,
Managua or Manchester, has become an
essential part of doing business globally.
Virtual contact centers (VCC) present a
potential solution to companies that need to
lower costs while increasing top-line growth
through customer satisfaction and retention.
VCCs, however, can be complex: They combine
technologies, systems, products, services,
channels, customers and agents working
throughout the world. Given these
complexities, managing and measuring
performance of a VCC can be time consuming
and costly.
Business users managing VCCs can struggle
to gain a full view and control of their
systems and teams, which are dispersed
geographically. VCCs should be closely
managed for optimal performance to ensure
that they are meeting both financial and
customer service expectations. A three-step
approach includes:
Simplify the technologies.
Companies implementing a VCC should
incorporate technologies with a framework
that lets them capture the VCC’s
complexities and turn the level of detail
into meaningful, useful insights; empower
business users by giving them key management
tools, access privilege control and
dashboard views of the business-relevant
information.
Secure the interactions. The right
VCC infrastructure will create secure
partitioned areas within the VCC for
multiple business users, so only the
customer information relevant to that
person’s job can be accessed. At the same
time, VCC technology needs to provide
analytics capabilities that enable managers
to quickly understand and analyze customer
information to make decisions about how to
route calls and address issues in real time.
Software with this kind of functionality
enables closer management without revealing
confidential information to inappropriate
staff within the contact center environment.
Standardize the approach. If
virtual contact centers are a collage of
disparate people, systems and technologies,
companies need a glue to hold them all
together. Companies should choose a system
that also enables business continuity in a
disaster situation by helping managers
re-route calls, without negatively impacting
customers.
Rex Dorricott is CEO of
Exony, Boston.
For more information
(click here)