Network Visibility: In a fix? Fix it!

The cloud-delivered services that your business thrives on are susceptible to multiple performance-impacting elements sitting in your network. While most businesses are well-versed with the basic concept of network management, what is the ‘secret sauce’ that makes your network management a cut above the rest?

Before I answer that question, let me walk you through three recent occurrences that will help you understand why we need to talk about the aforementioned ‘secret sauce’.

Amazon Web Services Blackout– Even the mighty shall fall. On 2nd March 2017, S3, Amazon’s popular web-hosting service, came to a grinding halt when the servers that power them suddenly vanished. Quora, Trello, Slack, Venmo, Sprinklr and IFTTT were the top amongst other affected services, which were thrown for a loop by the downtime. The outage was said to be so severe, It took amazon over four hours to get the lights back on. According to Cyence Inc., a start-up that specializes in estimating cyber-risks, it “cost $150 million losses for companies in the S&P 500 index and $160 million for U.S. financial services companies using the infrastructure.

The Cloudflare Mishap– The network service provider’s tenth birthday celebrations went awry as they got hit by a significant BGP routing error. It was June 24, 2019, when their users woke up to inaccessible websites. The brief outage took down a number of crypto information and trading sites including CoinMarketCap and Coinbase. For a moment CoinDesk’s widget went on to display a price of $26 per bitcoin. During the outage that lasted nearly two hours 15% of Cloudflare’s global traffic was affected and services including Discord, Facebook and Reddit were knocked out.

The Summer of Outages– Sumer 2019, in particular, was not kind to the internet and netizens. From big boys like Google, Facebook and Twitter to apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger and Apple Music & TV, none were spared by the network blackouts that hit millions of users and services worldwide. It started with a massive Google outage on 2nd June, followed by Cloudflare on June 24th, AWS on July 2nd, Facebook and its entire portfolio of services on July 3rd, and finally checking the box with Apple on July 4, with a three-hour nationwide outage of iCloud, affecting almost every part of its cloud-based service.

While such instances are rare and you have very thin chances of predicting the challenges of tomorrow, end-to-end visibility into the network and infrastructure can help you better insulate your organization against such debilitating wildfires.

That brings us to ‘secret sauce’, which by now you would have guessed is —Network Visibility. Because more often than not, the condition underlying these outages can be boiled down to a lack of network visibility and control.

Network Traffic Analysis for Incident Response

A recent survey by Vanson Bourne suggests that almost two-thirds of organizations consider network blind spots as one of the biggest challenges when trying to protect their data.

With thousands of ongoing performance altering events, the network can go belly-up for multiple reasons. To begin with, as your network architecture expands, every new device, branch office or application coming on board only adds to the complexity. Keeping a vigilant eye on all the transactions over the network not only helps you analyze and optimize the delivery of applications and services, but also gives you actionable real-time insights around multiple parameters, needed to prevent outage-inducing blind spots.

Speaking of real-time data insights, we are talking everything, from traffic, bandwidth consumption, latency and packet loss to lossy links, network and firewall and application availability and everything in between. Real-time data analysis provides a clear vantage point into configuration management and capacity consumption, giving you all the data to address trends developing across the network. Need more reasons to believe why it’s a good idea? Here you go:

• Lower MTTR
• Better capacity planning
• Quick identification quicker diagnosis
• Improved network and application performance
• No finger-pointing between teams
• Enhanced security
• Early identification of trends

Motivated enough?

RIDE WITH US

Unlike many other SD-WAN solutions, Aryaka offers a global, fully managed SD-WAN delivered as-a-service. This means there is no need for separate visibility into an SD-WAN overlay and a physical underlay.

Our SmartInsights provide deep insights into the state of a customer’s WAN, accessible via MyAryaka, a cloud-based orchestration and visibility portal that gives customers the ability to configure, control and manage all Aryaka’s Managed SD-Services.

CURIOUS TO KNOW MORE?

Join our webinar on Feb 18th 11:30 am IST as we give you a live demo of Aryaka SmartInsights platform. Meet the experts and get your questions answered in a session that encompasses anything and everything around network management and visibility. You can register here.

Can’t wait? Got question? Feel free to reach out for a free demo.