As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Andy de Clerck who is the CTO of TENEO on how DEM is shaping enterprise IT monitoring as the adoption of Cloud and SaaS becomes increasingly widespread, and as the 'new normal' introduced by the recent pandemic creates new security vulnerabilities and performance implications. The interview is as follows:
Why is there so much interest in DEM?
With users untethered from the traditional infrastructure, organizations are looking to advance the adoption of 'cloud-first, remote-first' strategies. These strategies require a clear understanding of overall experience across the digital supply chain, incorporating a flexible, often public, online infrastructure.
To ensure 100% business resilience, 'anywhere operational' models aligned to this strategy require structural changes that rely on DEM.
Providing high-quality insights into users' digital experience, DEM highlights where improvements can be made. This inevitably blends with security policies, a compelling component of the next generation of business agility and performance.
Andy de Clerck, CTO, TENEO
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
Whilst enterprises have adopted cloud applications across their business, many will find that they are delivered within multi-cloud environments.
This has seen traditional monitoring tools across APM, IPM, and NPM, for example, only providing monitoring across the technologies that are under direct ownership and control
As the shift to cloud occurs, it is increasingly important to understand digital partners' performance, unmanaged services, and those owned by third parties, where there is no business relationship or SLA.
DEM allows organizations to gain precise insights to monitor and manage the digital experience. This includes insights into business efficiency and elements outside the technology itself, such as people, social, economic, and other important factors that enable agility.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
Teneo's DEM services leverage multiple components to extend the reach further into the complete digital infrastructure, no matter where it is provisioned or delivered. These services provide collaborated data from data lakes and distributed edge data sources.
It also embraces a full capability of awareness across digital overlay services and core underlay services from providers. This ensures the fully optimized performance levels needed to contend with business demand and consumption
Teneo's visibility services provide 'Real End-User Experience' monitoring regardless of location. These services provide insight to enable remediation of user issues experienced on any device irrespective of application type
Alongside this, Teneo has a range of solutions that focus on monitoring digital infrastructures across multi-cloud and traditional data centers. Further, solutions monitor connecting services such as SD-WAN and endpoint security.
Teneo's solutions analyze and filter data into top-level dashboards, which present meaningful and actionable data to the business. This extends across distributed digital infrastructures and facilitates the full end-to-end experience where required, enabling the adoption of a 'business anywhere' thought process
The Visibility Tools Suitability Assessment (VTSA) solution addresses 'experience monitoring' demands. It provides an assessment of existing monitoring tools across the traditional landscape, including APM, NPM, ITM, RUM, and EUEM. This enables businesses to identify and better understand gaps or blind spots
By providing valuable output, Teneo enables organizations to make investments effectively, maximize existing investment, and drive through evolution towards the 'anywhere operational' model that DEM supports.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
As recent events have driven change throughout essential business processes, the same move to online operations has made flexible infrastructure monitoring critical.
Organizations need to realize quickly that a shift to the cloud is not the end of its digital transformation journey. They will require a more efficient and capable infrastructure to take advantage of the agility this shift will bring.
The future is not just about working from home; there are fundamental advantages in a distributed infrastructure. This includes releasing the financial and operational burden of technology, which should be what experience monitoring helps deliver.
Driving change is never easy. But through partnerships to operationalize and enable these services, businesses can quickly realize additional agility. This includes taking advantage of augmented, artificial, and automated approaches, blended with people, social, economic, and indeed political impacts that may appear. DEM solutions provide a significant 'technical wealth' to anyone considering evolving further towards 'Total Experience Monitoring,' facilitating a 'business anywhere' approach.
Further, when it comes to monitoring data, many organizations struggle to consolidate data into one view. This slows down the diagnosis and resolution of user-impacting issues, elevates costs, degrades user satisfaction, and lowers productivity. With DEM, data is consolidated into a single view. This alleviates the need to manually gather data, allowing IT teams more time to give issues the necessary attention they deserve.
