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.

The Barcelona show is in full swing, unfortunately we didn’t have much time to attend the keynotes , but we did get to discuss networking management and monitoring with a great number of attendees and one thing stood out very clearly. How much enterprise networking professionals are concerned with bandwidth management. Not just looking at the bandwidth with tools like Netflow, but being able to prioritize and allocate bandwidth to certain applications over others within a corporate infrastructure. This is something that the carriers are already doing with MPLS and traffic engineering extensions. Interesting trend.