The Future of Work Is Hybrid
Building a secure, digitally connected hybrid workplace with zero compromises to employee productivity is no easy task. In today’s post-pandemic world, a large subset of employees are taking advantage of flexible work options, and their productivity hinges on the availability and usability of business-critical applications, such as video conferencing platforms, as well as the performance of underlying networks and Internet-based infrastructure. ThousandEyes Internet and cloud intelligence empowers IT and network teams to deliver a high-performing hybrid work environment.
Get a Global Update on Hybrid Work
SaaS Applications
SaaS apps, such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, or Workday, have been game-changing for enterprise users. But they can create significant blind spots for enterprise IT teams, who are responsible for ensuring their performance. The traditional monitoring techniques designed for apps hosted in data centers are simply not built for SaaS environments, where IT does not own the infrastructure or the application to instrument code changes. Overcoming SaaS blindness requires a new approach to monitoring and a deep understanding of how SaaS applications are delivered over the Internet.
The Guide to Taming SaaS App Architecture Sprawl
Collaboration Applications
Collaboration apps, such as Cisco Webex® and Microsoft Teams, have become a centerpiece of the modern workday. As team members opt for more flexible work arrangements that allow for better work-life balance, workers have become more distributed—across regions and time zones—than ever before. Video conferencing platforms keep workers connected and productive, whether they’re in their home office or at a corporate office space. For IT, assuring the performance of these apps is critical. Yet, collaboration platforms are underpinned by sophisticated and dynamic architectures that are built to provide reliable synchronous video, audio, and interactive capabilities. The IT teams who are tasked with assuring and troubleshooting collaboration apps must have visibility into this complex and dynamic environment to provide the best experiences for their workforce. Moreover, they need dashboards and reports that facilitate powerful overviews and rollups.
Internal Applications
The modular and distributed nature of new applications means they often rely on a number of external third-party services, backend integrations and cloud APIs, distributed across the Internet and mostly outside the control of the business. This creates a visibility gap that a traditional siloed approach to application monitoring fails to bridge. To see all of the external networks and dependencies your apps rely on, IT needs proactive and unified visibility into application experience that combines Internet and cloud intelligence with application performance monitoring (APM).
Achieving the Experience Expectations of Your Distributed Workforce
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
With the rise of remote work, employees are now connecting to enterprise services, applications and networks from a myriad of distributed locations both within and outside of the corporate perimeter. Organizations are now reconsidering their security at the network edge. When enterprises move to a SASE architecture, with solutions like Cisco Secure Access, they become more dependent on an increasing number of external networks and services that they do not own and that traditional monitoring tools can’t address—jeopardizing user experience. IT teams need to understand how end users experience any application, from wherever they’re sitting (whether that is their home office or an in-office conference room), while understanding every dependency that influences those experiences.
Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
VPNs have become synonymous with secure enterprise networks, wrapping an additional layer of security and privacy around online activity. Although VPNs provide an added layer of security for remote workers, they also add complexity when it comes to troubleshooting performance. VPNs can obfuscate the network connectivity between the remote worker and the VPN gateway, which means the network underlay is no longer visible. To gain insight into the end-to-end service delivery chain, IT teams need visibility into both the underlay and overlay paths through the VPN tunnel correlated with underlying network connectivity.
See Before You SASE: Optimizing Digital Experience for a Secure Hybrid Workforce
Local and Remote Connectivity
Whether workers connect to their applications from within the corporate perimeter or from remote locations, they need seamless and reliable performance to be their most productive. In a hybrid work model, where a large percentage of employees now work from their home workspace as well as in the office, the variability across local environments, most of which fall outside of IT’s span of control, can significantly impact performance. IT and helpdesk teams responsible for delivering exceptional workforce digital experience need comprehensive "single pane of glass" visibility from the end user to the SaaS and on-prem applications they rely on—inclusive of Wi-Fi and LAN performance, broadband ISP performance, and insights into Internet outages.
Featured Blog Posts
Three Steps to Gaining Visibility into Your Hybrid Workforce
Architecting Remote Access Without Sacrificing Security
Why ThousandEyes?
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Seamlessly discover VPN paths
Monitor the connectivity and performance of end-to-end network connections, including VPN overlay and underlay paths, for your on-the-go, remote, and campus workers.
Proactively manage app experiences
Rapidly identify and isolate fault domains with critical SaaS and collaboration applications, including those crossing your distributed workforce's networks or end user environments, and share the findings with vendors with ThousandEyes sharelinks and snapshots.
Quickly detect Wi-Fi issues
Monitor and proactively receive alerts on the performance of Wi-Fi networks and access points—from signal quality to throughput and retransmission rate.
Deliver productive digital experiences, wherever your workforce and applications are.