The BLAME Game - By John Fenga

Jan. 8, 2013 - PRLog -- In today's modern thought processes, it seems to be all too easy to simply say "OUTSOURCE". For most CFO's, this model works exceptionally well, however, it is not without its pitfalls.

The idea of offering full control of your network and application services to an outsourced company (perhaps in Malaysia or India) should send shivers up anybody’s spine.

The idea tends to work on paper; the thought of moving from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model will defiantly line the pockets of the shareholders (FOR NOW).

What happens when the system doesn’t work, when your CEO can’t receive emails, or payroll can no longer access accounts?

What happens when your phone (if it’s not an IP phone) runs hot from all of the sales guys or services guys on the road who cannot complete their daily function due to their inability to access core company applications?

What we have encountered time and time again is that, typically, Enterprise clients who outsource their network and application services experience the following situations:

1. The KPIs and/or SLAs are traditionally based on "availability", instead of real end user performance.

2. Suppliers dictate the business statistics, hence expansion plans are dependent upon their “view” of where you should invest your IT budget for enhanced performance: (a common reply in this situation WILL BE you need more bandwidth).

3. Important network information, such as: link utilisation, is provided by the service provider. Unfortunately, without the necessary tools in place prior to moving towards this model, you will have no way of confirming that their metrics reflects true performance.

4. When poor performance is experienced, the network, applications and server providers will all claim their metrics are within range, making root cause analysis extremely difficult.

5. User complaints are bounced from application to network and back without any holistic view of performance or ability to analyse root cause.

What CORE-nas can provide:

CORE-nas would look to deliver a passive, non-intrusive application performance monitoring system that provides real time SLA metrics across any provider infrastructure based on real end user performance. This would also offer the ability to:

1. Set service SLAs based upon actual client experience of applications, internal legacy systems or corporate web-based applications, regardless of infrastructure provider. Also giving you the ability to then hold the service providers along with solutions vendors accountable for their SLAs.

2. Root cause analysis: the ability to understand the network, the application or the server. Performance issues can be resolved without any intervention from Service Providers.

3. Historical analysis and permanent records of application and network performance. KPI and SLA compliance can be analysed and stored per minute, day, month, week or year.

4. Scenarios can be run to confirm if budget spent on WAN acceleration and additional hardware (servers, upgraded SDPs or RAID drives/memory) will improve performance. Cost benefit analysis can be confirmed before IT budget is committed: data centre moves, application updates, new IT services can all be de-risked cheaply and effectively.

Apart from the fact that this technology (rated by Gartner as the market leader) would give you a very proactive view on your services, it will also give you the confidence of moving towards the outsourced model the shareholders want.

To find out more on how CORE-nas can help contact us on info@core-nas.co or visit our website www.core-nas.co