The New York Times and countless other outlets have devoted a lot of editorial space of late to discussing the changing nature of the enterprise workforce. Specifically, “enterprise decentralisation” and the breaking down of geographical barriers that, in the past, may have hindered collaboration have been the prevailing trends, supported by the rise of the remote office and Gen Z’s expectations for flexibility.
What’s allowing for all of these changes to take flight is the slew of collaborative team applications either already available to enterprise teams or coming on the market. Fuze, Slack, Microsoft Teams and other communication platforms are part of a $3.5 billion global market that’s forecast to balloon by nearly 70 percent over the next three years, according to IDC.
But for this to succeed - both the continued trend of enterprise decentralisation and the growth of the UC market - enterprise IT teams need to be sure they’re deploying these solutions over network infrastructures that can handle a virtual avalanche of data from these new tech solutions.
This is easier said than done, as collaboration tools are just one category of application that’s taking up a growing share of network capacity in the modern enterprise. SaaS has never been more popular, after all, and teams leverage these cloud-delivered products for a wealth of operations, from sales tools to content management solutions, and for good reason: SaaS offers predictable pricing and relatively quick deployment as opposed to hardware-based solutions of the past.
These tools can be a double-edged sword for enterprise IT teams, however. Unlike legacy applications, which were largely owned and controlled in-house, SaaS tools are licensed and managed by a third-party. In theory, this arrangement takes some of the responsibility off of enterprise IT since they don’t own the hardware or control the cloud these SaaS products are delivered through.
But in reality, IT teams are still tasked with assuring end-user experience for all individuals leveraging the network, regardless of who “owns” the tool. So when there’s a performance issue with a SaaS app opposed to a legacy solution housed in a corporate data centre, IT will need a way to gain visibility into that environment even though they don’t own it outright in order to get to the root of the problem.
The problem is exacerbated by phenomena like shadow IT, which is even more rampant in a world where teams can quickly access and download SaaS solutions without the help (or explicit permission of) IT. Because collaboration tools require a great deal of network capacity to perform with minimal jitter or latency, IT needs to be hyper aware of situations where non-critical tools are sucking up network bandwidth at the expense of communication applications that are critical to business.
So how can enterprise IT be sure they have a true grasp on their network performance to ensure their communication tools run as smoothly as possible? Here are three tips:
