We’ve shared a lot about business continuity over the last 6 months, but what does it all mean in practice when you’re running the operational IT for large, complex, hybrid enterprise networks?

If you are certified to ISO9001 or ISO27001, you might remember that the question relating to business continuity planning asks, in so many words: ‘Do you have a plan?’ As long as a protocol of some form existed, the box could be ticked. But that ‘plan’ is something that a lot of large enterprises have had to rely on this year.

Complacency contributed to some issues. Budgeting priorities will have played a part, too, as always. But for many organisations, the pandemic has reordered priorities and identified tools and processes IT teams didn’t know they needed. Now we’re under more pressure than ever to monitor the business impact of COVID-19.

As the situation develops and new challenges arise, business continuity needs to leave the back page of your operations manual and come to the fore. You’re sure to have some form of business continuity plan filed away. There’s never been a more fitting time to get it off the shelf and quantify it into actual metrics. What do you need to understand to make it work?

A robust business continuity strategy will be based on how you keep providing a product or service to your customers, as well as maintaining the supply chains, systems and functions that mean you’re able to deliver those products or services. Everything should be made ready and operational just in case.

Once the plan is in operation, how will you measure performance and success? Your plan should have concrete objectives – queries resolved, applications processed, units delivered… While the plan’s in action, you can continuously measure how you are performing against these objectives.

There’s no template that fits every business, which is why a gap analysis will help at this point. When you’ve assessed the contributing factors, the gap analysis finds ways to extract all of the metrics you need and plug them into an appropriate dashboarding solution. Often this will involve too many SLAs to display them all together coherently.

Single pane of glass dashboarding – able to visualise at a glance, at a high level, information from multiple different tools – has proven very difficult to achieve. There are a number of tools on the market now that have started to gain some ground, but each has its own limitations. You’re welcome to talk to us about the different solutions that are out there and how to select the best one for your needs.

Continuity in a disaster is always going to be a challenge, whatever your industry or sector. But all enterprises need to be able to strategise and prepare for a worst-case scenario. If the current pandemic is anything to go by, future worst-case scenarios may be much worse than we’ve imagined. It’s impossible to remove all risk, but are you doing what you can to mitigate the risks that remain?

A common thread that’s emerged in our conversations with potential clients is that Enterprises need better visibility in order to deal with newly hybrid workforces, IT transformation and decentralisation.

The questions we’ve been asking as we construct our Business Continuity Dashboards are connecting IT with business outcomes in a way that makes sense – particularly under current circumstances – but that doesn’t seem to have been done before.

These are questions like: If productivity is down, is it because end users are experiencing network issues? If you’re not delivering goods on time, which part of your system is slowing you down? How does it impact your bottom line when absentee rates surge? Are you still able to do what you do as a business at pre-pandemic efficiency levels? Where are the tools and indicators to help you see all of this information?

The answer, very often, lies in data that you’re already collecting in one form or another. After all, it’s information that’s crucial to your top-level decision making. But in most organisations reporting covers discrete areas, with no cohesive view of how each area is performing in relation to any other. The data is not live, it’s tricky to access and it’s potentially hard to interpret.

We set ourselves the challenge of taking the data that you care about from spreadsheets and isolated role-specific applications and visualising it in live dashboards. We can enrich these with data that you’re not yet collecting if there are gaps in visibility, with the end goal of making business continuity measurable.

IT
We are all used to the traditional performance and availability monitoring of the critical services that users need to perform their jobs.

However, for a more complete picture of how well the business is performing… we can also monitor (for example) the network and user interactions of e-mail and telephony systems and score all of these along with business performance metrics like enquiries, deliveries and invoicing etc… We will bring all of this information together to confirm that the business is achieving its performance and productivity goals and then measure how consistently this is being upheld with SLA scoring and dashboarding.

Productivity
What you choose to measure here will be specific to your Enterprise, but the aim is to measure how well your people and processes are performing. Indicators and metrics, you might want to monitor range from:

• IP telephony – Are sales staff making as many phone calls as they would if they were in the office? How many customer service agents are logged in?
• HR applications – How many employees are off sick or on annual leave?
• Supply chain logistics – How long can your hospital function without delivery of PPE?
• Manufacturing – Are IT failures in quality control slowing down production?

Finances
Financial dashboards would be available only via secure, role-based access to select stakeholders, but it makes sense to gather and visualise this data in one place. It means you can easily see how well your business is performing financially and what factors could be having an impact. For example, vastly longer lead time visible in the productivity metrics may be affecting your stock price.

Your top-level business continuity score – indicating the overall health of your Enterprise – is informed by a combination of data from all three areas. We’re here to give senior leadership teams confidence in their ability to track business continuity through live data feeds and an easy-to-understand dashboard interface.

Download your copy of the business continuity brochure here and book a free demo of the dashboards.

You’ve barricaded the front door against Covid-19, but do you know what’s happening out back?

While the global pandemic may have advanced the business case for digital transformation by leaps and bounds, some concerning survey results have emerged over the last couple of months that suggest monitoring strategy is, as ever, an afterthought.

At least some of the change we’ve seen since March will be permanent, with more than four-fifths of companies saying that they will allow employees to continue working remotely, according to Gartner research. While almost half of those surveyed said they will let employees work remotely full-time, flexi-time will be adopted by many others.

The goals are clear: to build more a resilient operational model, and to meet shifting employee expectations. However, alongside the emergence of this complex, hybrid workforce, 29% of business leaders admitted they were not taking any measures to track productivity remotely.

At the same time, more Gartner findings suggest that CIOs are shifting spend to cloud-based desktop offerings without necessarily factoring in the implications for monitoring end-user experience. We’re also seeing massive growth in the adoption of SD-WAN, but Viavi’s ‘State of the network’ report indicates that better visibility of end-user experiences will be needed to make this work, particularly when it comes to remote users.

There will also, inevitably, be those looking to take advantage of gaps in your visibility in what Viavi have labelled the ‘age of dynamic disruption’. As enterprises have increased connectivity, networks have become even more exposed to vulnerabilities. 73% of business leaders who responded to their survey said security professionals need full visibility into network infrastructure if they are to enhance cyber security efforts and speed remediation.

And while 54% had already deployed internet of things (IoT) devices and a further 24% said they plan to do so in the next 12 months, only 57% of them had a mechanism in place to monitor those devices. After making rapid technological changes, many organisations are leaving themselves at worst dangerously exposed, or at least in the dark.

There’s always the threat of another crisis just around the corner. It could be a second wave of coronavirus, or it could be a climate change related phenomenon. Business continuity planning is intended to safeguard against threats like these. Many business leaders will now be asking themselves how their business continuity strategy can be reconfigured to ensure they don’t get caught out (again).

You can start by checking how your business continuity strategy is performing in real-time. We’ve developed dashboards which are able to connect data from multiple sources on the outcomes that matter to your enterprise, whether they’re related to IT service performance or availability, employee or supply chain productivity, or financial input and output.

By giving your team and yourself that visibility, you avoid the risk of assuming all is well when it’s not. You avoid the risk of your competitors stealing a march while you scramble to find out why your numbers are down. You avoid becoming a victim of your own eagerness to adapt.

Book a live demo here if you would like to see the dashboards in action and find out how they could work for your business.

If you would like to discuss a specific issue with your critical data monitoring, call us on 01782 752 369.

Many businesses have a desire to move away from complex, difficult to support legacy applications.  Actually achieving that is far harder than just putting it into a strategy document, though!

In the case of Tipico, the Maltese gaming and betting business, they had 160 servers supporting a three-tier Java application. With so many servers involved, it’s only natural that despite the very best intentions, different parts of the application stack end up on different Java or other library version. This all adds up to more complexity and thus Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for any issues.

Tipico transitioned their platform to be orchestrated by Kubernetes (K8s), all run using components of Amazon Web Services. Their infrastructure is now purely infrastructure as code and Cloud based.

Moving your key application(s) to microservices running on a Cloud platform doesn’t just involve deciding on which provider is the most cost effective, has the best geographical presence to suit your customer base or offers the right services for your applications. If Kubernetes has the ability to shrink or grow the number of nodes or pods running your application, how do you monitor it?  Just including your monitoring agent in your base server build image doesn’t work anymore.

A next-generation APM tool which automatically and continuously discovers your infrastructure and application is the key. Tipico’s evaluation of the APM market determined that Instana was the best fit for their infrastructure.

Instana’s ability to create ‘Application Perspectives’ is great for DevOps teams, where different teams are focused on different parts of the application.  Does a team working on the payments microservice really need to know how the login microservice is performing? Application Perspectives let teams filter out the noise, letting them focus on the metrics of the services they are responsible for.

A DevOps mindset (Continuous Improvement/Continuous Development or CI/CD) also means regular code releases to add features or fix bugs. Instana’s API provides an easy method to further integrate the CI/CD pipeline and monitoring. A simple curl call can notify Instana of a release, which is then visible in Instana UI as a ‘release marker’. This means developers and support teams can both immediately correlate any radical changes in performance or stability against the release.

Normally, a blog post needs a conclusion. In this case though, I think two statistics from the Tipico case study stand out to really show the success of the project:

• 3x increase in the number of deployments per month
• 10x improvement in MTTR

The global COVID-19 pandemic has, in more organisations than will ever admit it, exposed business continuity plans as tick-box formalities with little to no value in a real crisis.

In our tech-enabled world, we’ve begun to take it for granted that the IT systems and devices we rely on ‘will just work’. That’s turned out not to be the case, with many organisations facing issues with licensing, availability and connectivity, for example. Even those contingencies that were in place didn’t account for the speed and scale of change that we’ve had to deal with in the last few months.

Some enterprises have found gaps in their ability to track productivity and engagement among employees working from home. That’s not to mention issues with monitoring network availability, application performance and security at a time when new technologies are being adopted and infrastructures rapidly adapted.

While most organisations will have got to the functioning stage by now, there are inevitably compromises being made due to the nature of working from home. On the surface, operations may seem to be running smoothly, but how is your business being impacted? Will your business’ reputation suffer because you simply can’t see the issues you’re having with, for example, employee productivity or app availability?

To make a proper plan and make sure that plan is working, you have to ensure business continuity is measurable. This will more than likely include metrics that are not typically visualised by your IT monitoring dashboards, but which are central to monitoring business performance, such as productivity and engagement, absentee rates and supply chain deliverables.

Our team has developed Business Continuity Dashboards which link data from multiple sources to provide an overview of your key business metrics, so that you have remote visibility of performance against your SLAs in every aspect of operations. Root cause analysis can be conducted, and problems addressed to ensure good customer experiences are maintained. When a crisis hits you can carry on as close to usual as possible, but you’ll also be able to tell at a glance what ‘usual’ is.

Let’s face it, things aren’t going to go back to normal. A successful and sustainable transition out of lockdown will mean learning the lessons available in your data to make more informed business decisions. But you need visibility to be able to see and analyse what that data is telling you. Whether the gaps that have been exposed are on security, on operations or on networks, now is the time to get better visibility and improve your monitoring capability permanently.

We believe that those organisations which take the time to reflect on what they’ve learned will be proactive in using monitoring technology to future-proof their enterprise. They will put themselves in a position to emerge stronger from this devastating pandemic.

Contact us to discuss the place of critical data monitoring and visualisation in your business continuity strategy.

Saying this year has been strange is, obviously, something of an understatement. Back in January I don’t expect anyone at Zoom expected their brand to become a genuine household name by now. IT professionals will have been exceptionally busy not just supporting business transformation from office to home working, but helping friends and families keep in touch.  There’s no escape once you are the go-to technical guru in your extended family!  I’ve ended up giving advice on Zoom / Skype meetings for school governors in Liverpool and helping a nephew build his first gaming PC (all socially distanced of course!).

Whilst family quizzes on Zoom and Skype sessions with grandparents have been essential for beating the boredom and retaining a degree of contact, they are also just two of the things which might be impacting on business remote access.  Are those family calls routing across a corporate connection as somebody forgot to disconnect their VPN into the office?  Visibility at protocol level can help identify gremlins such as retransmission timeouts and zero windows.  Likewise, analysis can help identify traffic destinations – if we don’t use Zoom in the business, why is it transiting my network?  A combination of these metrics can also aid help desks who, by default, now troubleshoot home broadband connections.  Is a user’s poor virtual desktop or application experience down to an issue in the datacentre or because they are competing for bandwidth with Netflix, Disney+ and Fortnite on their home WiFi?

Utilisation Metrics can provide critical information on capacity and associated bottlenecks.  If more capacity is needed, then you have hard facts to backup a business case for an upgrade.  On the other hand, if things are running smoothly, you can provide information to management to show previous investment has been money well spent and any considerations of reducing bandwidth to save money would impact on productivity.

Another impact of the current business climate is that budgets are being scrutinised more then ever now, so any new IT project must offer the highest amount of value to the business.  Thus, a platform such as ExtraHop Reveal(x), which builds on ExtraHop’s experience in Performance Analytics but adds industry leading Security Detection and Response becomes much more attractive.

The rush to home working in the UK led to a shortage of laptops and PCs.  To stay productive, some staff have been using their own home computing equipment.  Home networks and PCs are notorious for being a security nightmare, with unpatched routers, unsupported OSes, outdated AV and the like.  It is more important then ever to watch the activities of these devices when they are connected to a corporate Network.

VPN policies may have been relaxed but even so, some events represent actionable findings.  If a member of UK staff connects to the VPN from a North American IP address, are they perhaps using a commercial VPN service to access a US streaming service which has geo-location restrictions?  Or is it an attacker making use of compromised credentials?  Similarly, should a user be connected to the VPN from two different countries at the same time?

Further insight into Network traffic, obtained through Reveal(x)’s ability to decode over 50 Enterprise protocols, can also enhance Network Security.  If there is a sudden spike in Active Directory accounts being locked out, is this a sign of a brute force attack in progress?  By linking Security Detections, Reveal(x) can present alerts using the MITRE ATT&CK framework, enabling a responder to understand if the lockouts are user error or part of a more dangerous attack.

In summary, ExtraHop Reveal(x) can play an important part in assisting businesses to cope with the “new normal”.  Reveal(x) can help Operation and Security teams gain valuable insight into their Domains, with a wide range of off-the-shelf and custom integrations ensuring it is not just another siloed tool.  Take a look at ExtraHop’s Datasheet to find out tips for ensuring the availability and securing of remote access.