Business Analytics and Assurance

Digital transformation has given birth to a variety of new digital business models, which rely on an increasingly global and connected world. Digital transformation thrives on flexibility and agility, requiring companies to seamlessly and confidently operate across this connected world. To succeed, enterprises must not only transform their business to fulfill new growth potential and digital objectives, but also adjust IT goals to support the transformation.

While that sounds like a technical challenge, it’s really a business imperative: When business fortunes rise and fall on how quickly and easily your company can deliver new business services, making sure that your global IT infrastructure is built to support a connected business model is a vital foundational element.

Companies face some complex issues, including the following: 

• Developing the ability to modernize, rapidly iterate, and scale applications to support increasingly demanding business needs.
• Assuring the performance of these applications while mitigating security risks.
• Streamlining and managing a complex and changing IT infrastructure to support rapid adoption of pillars of digital innovation such as cloud, IoT, and big data analytics.

By combining service assurance, which protects against system, network, and application failures, with security assurance, which shields companies from cyberthreats, companies can reach next-generation levels of service availability, reliability, and responsiveness.

We call this concept business assurance, and it represents the degree of confidence that an information- and services-driven business will operate properly in a consistent manner.  

This is a distinctly different approach that lets networking and security professionals work from the same source of intelligence to accurately pinpoint the cause of service degradations and outages. We can do this by applying a consistent single source of truth to intelligently identify the root cause of the problem as part of the threat response lifecycle.

Leveraging Smart Data

The increased complexity of IT infrastructures highlights the value of the data moving across the connected world, and business assurance is built to maximize that value. The key to success lies in taking a data-driven approach. We convert internet traffic into smart data with ATLAS Global Threat Intelligence, which is based on analysis of one-third of the global internet traffic. Through our patented Adaptive Service Intelligence^™ (ASI) technology, we transform intranet traffic and cloud application flows into high value, multi-dimensional metadata—smart data—in real time, at the collection point. These primary smart data are then complemented with data from a variety of systems and sources, such as XFlow, active testing, management information base (MIB) queried with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), and log files.   

NETSCOUT’s recent integration of ASI-driven smart data generated by InfiniStreamNG^™ (ISNG) with Spectrum is a cornerstone of this concept, deriving extended value by using internet and intranet traffic and cloud application flows as the same data source for both service and security assurance. This drives some pretty valuable synergy, as Network Operations and Security Operations start to collaborate more efficiently and establish a common situational awareness. Ultimately, this helps them better manage incident response, including problem/threat detection, mitigation, and remediation based on effective root-cause analysis. Even better, the walls start coming down in IT, supporting the streamlined process necessary for reinforcing a connected business model.

Retaining control over end-to-end business assurance during digital transformation is a key consideration. The big risk lies in the temptation to rely on an increasing number of infrastructures, platforms, and software as service providers help address business assurance challenges. While these providers offer a variety of management tools for their respective domains, they lack the breadth and depth necessary for pervasive visibility across domains.  NETSCOUT’s ISNG and vSCOUT virtual appliances offer pervasive visibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling IT to retain control and govern service and security assurance anywhere.   

Click here to learn more about how business assurance can help achieve desirable business outcomes on your DX journey.