| | July 20198The landscape for Network Managed Services (NMS) providers continues to become more challenging especially as application, management, and compliance requirements keep evolving.Proactive support is a core component of today's NMS. IT budgets for small- and medium-sized businesses continue to shrink, yet there is heightened focus on finding ways to squeeze more productivity out of limited resources. NMS can provide a path for existing staff to spend more time in proactive, business-oriented pursuits vs. mundane, reactive tasks.For example, while Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can range from simple tracking of status (green/yellow/red) on monitored ports to performance and utilization analysis, evolving application requirements and technologies are demanding an increased focus on ensuring SLA contracts meet customer expectations and business requirements. It is necessary for NMS providers to "up their game" to remain competitive. This naturally extends to any organization providing "as-a-Service" offerings (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as well, as customers graduating to higher levels of nimble solution responses.The Application LandscapeApplication performance is more critical than ever, and expectations for NMS have increased accordingly. In fact, application requirements are being driven by:· Cloud/Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies and adoption· Business use and social media· Mobile computing (assumed access to any service from anywhere, anytime)Understanding what's driving these requirements and these evolving trends is critical to businesses striving to remain competitive in an ever-accelerating digital world. Coupled with the fact that today's users have a "right here, right now" expectation from their applications, accessed predominantly from their mobile device, the shopper is far more likely to cancel a product search (or order) if response timesareunacceptable. Take into account that what's considered an acceptable response time is shrinking every day, subsequently, you have shoppers with short attention spans who willquickly look for alternatives to complete the transaction. This results in obvious loss of immediate revenue. Long-term, it likely leads to a greater loss of customer trust and perception of the stability and value of your company.This is where NMS can play an integral role. An NMS provider can offer insights onapplication performance, including end-to-end network path analysis and response time indicators (such as latency, delay, and loss). The NMS provider can also develop and implement a strategy that helps your company adapt to the changing application landscape. Network Management and VisibilitySolutions that provide visibility into application performance are becoming more commonplace. Customers with access to these tools expect that their NMS provider to proactively respond prior to user impact. While NMS has historically focused on reactive response to network outages, this new model requires earlier response, and avoidance of potential loss of revenue. Network hardware and software manufacturers (such as Cisco, HP) have deep-dived into technologies intended to assist customers in better leveraging existing resources and becoming more efficient and productive. One such effort is intent-based networking. This allows the network team to define the intent, or desired state of the network, after which leveraging orchestration technology to deploy the necessaryinfrastructure configuration to achieve this state.These solutions provide deeper visibility into network stability and performance indicators. While obviously a positive thing, this can also raise unwarranted alarms and false positives when it comes to the actual user experience. The risk of this heightened visibility,especially in cases where the customer might Evolving Expectations for NMSIN MY OPINIONBy Brian Clarke, Solutions Architect, Networking and Collaboration, OneNeck IT Solutions
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