The Daily Network Monitor

The SaaS web-based application delivery model provides corporations with hosted set of business centric applications without a need to purchase, maintain or customize the application to fit their unique needs. 

Many organizations have adopted this model for sales, procurement, CRM and human resources applications for example. Unlike the traditional software acquisition model, where a corporation invests in an application and is required to build the infrastructure to support the application, SaaS requires negligible upfront investment beyond user training. Application maintenance, upgrades and development are the SaaS provider’s responsibility. This is a very attractive value model for many companies. 

When SaaS web-based applications are being evaluated and purchased by a corporation, the IT and network management functions are usually not included in the planning, evaluation and decision process, as IT is perceived as a roadblock. Most frequently, this effort is driven by the business unit or department accessing the application.

This lack of cooperation can cause problems to IT and network management after the application is brought on-line. IT and network management discover the application is deployed and being accessed after the fact. Usually when users contact IT or network management to complain about application performance as the application is bandwidth intensive or existing network infrastructure is near capacity. Another factor to consider is since all SaaS based applications are connected through the Internet outside of the managed corporate network infrastructure, they are subject to any number of issues including forwarding delays, connection reliability and traffic contention. 

Business units evaluating SaaS as an option need to include IT and network management to allow for resource planning and monitoring of end-to-end SaaS specific application traffic to ensure that availability and performance expectations are achieved.

We recently wrote an entry on Blogger predicts the death of death that highlighted the death of IT. 

Au contraire, my friends, IT is a strategic asset and in most cases a competitive differentiator, and there are plenty of examples from the Fortune 500 all the way down to small businesses. Within the context of IT, it all comes down to predictable and reliable delivery of information to both internal and external consituencies. The foundation of predictable and reliable delivery of this actionable information is the network infrastructure. Unfortunately, many IT executives view the network as a utility rather than an asset, and while this is certainly understandable, it is the right view?

The real test is when the network or a server goes down. How is it viewed then? The new reality is down-time is money, no ands, ifs or buts.

IT and networking professionals need to highlight the criticality of the network as a business asset and not just a utility.

Browsing around, I found this piece in India New England (yes, that’s the name of the publication) called Network downtime can be big expense for business.  Tim Hebert is definitely singing our song.  To wit:

Unplanned downtime is what keeps IT professionals, executives and business owners awake at night. Natural disasters and utility failures only account for three percent of all outages. Hardware failures account for less than 10 percent of all network failures. Systems errors account for less than eight percent of failures; application errors, 19 percent.

Industry experts estimate that almost 60 percent of network failures are caused by human error. This problem can be attacked through better training for IT organizations and end-users, better network documentation, better change-management controls and processes and better network monitoring and management.

Sixty percent of network failures caused by human error?  Wow.  There’s no citation to back that up, but it has the ring of truth.  After all, if downtime came from more controllable sources, there wouldn’t be so much of it, right?

In any case, Tim’s piece makes clear the case for effective network management and network monitoring.  I hope IT managers take heed and make a small investment in protection against what could be a huge loss.