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The future of network reporting

The business IT environment is changing rapidly as more enterprises move to the cloud. The resulting dependence on bought-in applications will make service assurance a key issue for both enterprises and service providers.

Enterprise managers and service providers alike need a service assurance tool that is easy to use and accepted as an industry standard.

The Here and Now

First: IT is so pervasive that it could easily soak up all available management time.

Second: There is an understanding that networks, the internet, broadband etc are now a dependable, always-on utility comparable to gas, water and electricity.

How much time did the enterprise manager of 1911 spend ensuring the smooth running of the electricity supply? The record is unclear, but probably not much. Your average entrepreneur, then as now, thirsting for profit and hungry for success, would regard this as a housekeeping job.

And Third: The cost of in-house IT resources is rising, and many enterprises find recruitment or retention of skilled staff yet another problem that distracts them from core business activities. In-house IT brings independence but it also brings vulnerability. It risks becoming the tail that wags the dog.

“Networks, the internet, broadband, etc are 

now a dependable, always-on utility comparable to gas, water and electricity”

Therefore, just as enterprises have long outsourced business functions such as fleet management, building maintenance and training, they are now increasingly happy -doubtless in many cases deeply relieved - to outsource their IT systems. As a strategy it’s entirely consistent with the general imperative to make businesses leaner, more efficient and less burdened with overhead.

So as IT comes of age, it leaves home. The situation changes from:“Our business is successful because we control our own applications running on our own servers’to: “Our business is successful because top-quality service providers deliver all our IT.”

Control replaced by dependence

Moving to IT outsourcing represents a major shift in enterprise thinking. It can require strong management nerves because the business no longer has total, undisputed control over hardware and software. It’s suddenly dependent on a third party provider who might not even be in the same country. The reward is a simplified existence that leaves enterprise managers free to devote more of their energies to core activities. The price - the gamble - is dependency on services and people they can’t control. And managers don’t like losing control.

It’s rather like giving up driving to work in your own car and taking to public transport. The analogy may not be perfect but it does highlight a key problem that then faces enterprises that outsource their IT.

Only an extreme optimist would see commuting by public transport as a problem-free option. Buses and trains can be late or may not turn up at all. Even if they’re on time, the travel experience may be good on some days, bad on others. The whole venture is fundamentally not controllable by the user. (The alternative - driving one’s own car - is in several respects not wholly user controllable either, but this tends to be overlooked.)

The service assurance imperative

A solution would be a service level agreement (SLA) that promised a dependable, acceptable service, backed by enough competition in the market-place to give the passenger the option of changing service provider if the SLA wasn’t met. 

In the world of public transport this is largely wishful thinking. In the world of IT, it is the bedrock of market confidence.

The key to successful outsourcing… 

for both enterprises and service providers – is service assurance. If you’re the customer, you want to be able to monitor the performance of the IT that you’re buying, and reassure yourself that the enterprise is getting exactly what is being paid for. On a more personal level you also want to reclaim some of the control you’ve given up, and being able to at least watch the traffic and intervene when you judge that things could be better, is a powerful argument for insisting on service assurance.

On the other side of the fence, if you’re a service provider it’s going to be much easier to sell your services if you can anticipate demand and offer each customer a means of proving that your service is always up and running and meeting the SLA.  A savvy customer will soon learn to avoid service providers who don’t offer this provision.

Bear in mind that enterprise managers may also need service assurance as part of their own protection. Managers are answerable to directors, shareholders and other stakeholders. Foolish would be the manager who had to report, after some avoidable mishap: ‘I was offered the option of service monitoring but passed on it’.

A shift from network assurance

To recap, the first key change in the enterprise IT environment is that enterprises are less interested in the network because they can now pretty much take that for granted. What they’re really interested in is the services running on the network, because these are the drivers of the business.

This presents a new set of problems, because there are more and more services and service providers coming on to the market, particularly as the cloud becomes an everyday reality and not just a concept or an aspiration. Many network providers will also become service providers, and in order to do this they may subcontract to smaller service providers. Or there will be an increasingly large pool of smaller, independent service providers.

What is certain is that enterprises will have a much greater choice of provider or service partner, and as in other areas, there will be the good and the less good. Making the right choice in every aspect of IT will be important but it won’t be straightforward.

In such a complex, fragmented and highly competitive environment, there will be an obligation on whoever provides service assurance to make the data clear and easy to understand. The platform must be easy to use, so that enterprise managers aren’t dragged back to the ‘old’ state of affairs where they’re spending too much time on IT- related matters. For many enterprises that would be a serious disincentive to moving to the cloud, as its benefits might be perceived as too marginal

The cloud changes relationships

With the advent of the cloud, the dynamics of customer relationships are shifting rapidly. In the past the customer’s world has been relatively simple: the enterprise has its own hardware, feeding into a network bought from Verizon, BT etc.

That was a straightforward enough exercise for the customer and it was good for the service provider because in essence it meant that they owned that customer. It was a comfortable relationship for both parties. Once in, there had to be an overwhelming reason for the customer to get out before it was worth making the effort.

In the more recent past that situation started to change as the benefits of outsourcing began to be realised. But rather than shop around, customers have tended simply to go to their existing network provider and say: ‘Can you do a few things extra for me? Like my VoIP and my email?’ As a result, the service provider still effectively owns that customer, so in terms of business dynamics not a great deal has changed except that the customer now uses less hardware.

Obviously some enterprises have moved further than others from the traditional customer-supplier relationship, but in general terms that is where we are today.

Future dynamics

In the future, as we have already suggested, the dynamics of this environment will be much more complicated as enterprises realise that there is nothing to stop them casting their net much more widely.

Many will explore the market for best value deals and build up a portfolio of services bought from a range of different providers: CRM from here, hosted email from there... The problem for enterprise then becomes keeping track of a host of different suppliers.

That brings us back to the supreme importance of service assurance, not just as a means of accessing performance data but as a means of saving management time.

Thus, service assurance becomes an environment in its own right

Standard reporting

Once the basic need for service assurance is recognised, the next logical step is to look at the scope for standardising it. Because without a standard service assurance platform, an enterprise customer could end up with as many reporting formats as it has service providers. This is already happening, as service providers agree on the need to give customers a service monitoring facility but don’t agree - or haven’t yet agreed - on the need for all customers to use the same reporting format.

From the customer’s point of view this is a messy and increasingly unacceptable situation. They find themselves having to learn to use several different tools, all with different login procedures, all with different reporting formats, and probably none of them directly comparable with any other provider’s reports. And to cap it all, most reports are in technical language that enterprise managers may not be able to interpret without help from their own IT engineers - if they have any, with many of their services in the cloud.

An unsurprising outcome is that in practice, enterprise managers have access to service assurance tools but don’t use them as much as they should. And given that the data is largely incomprehensible anyway, there may be a strong sense that they’re not missing much. This isn’t good for either enterprises or service providers, and it doesn’t help the cause of service assurance or the cloud.

A service for everyone

It’s a compelling argument for a single service assurance tool that everyone can use. Not just IT engineers, but also - primarily, in fact - enterprise managers who want information in a format they can use to make management decisions. They want a tool that is actually helping them to run and improve their business, and isn’t just paying lip service to a clause in an SLA about providing service assurance data.

Full integration

For ease of use, a standard service assurance tool also needs to integrate fully and easily with an enterprise’s existing systems. That would make a major difference to its functionality.

It needs to be able to sit comfortably on a manager’s desktop and through one browser window give visibility of all the services bought in from all external providers.

One effective and efficient way to do this is to have a service assurance tool that is itself a cloud service, switchable on and off as needed. It can be a service bought directly by the enterprise, or it can be supplied as part of a provider’s service package. If it has currency throughout the IT industry as a standard reporting tool, its actual provenance doesn’t matter. What matters more is that it is there and being used routinely, because it is so easy to use that there is no excuse not to.

One major advantage of such a universal standard assurance tool would be that if the enterprise bought additional services, these could simply be ‘plugged in’ to the tool. There would be nothing to install or learn - any new service would be visible in seconds, alongside all other services, its performance measured against the same criteria.

"One effective and efficient way to do this is to have a service assurance tool that is itself a cloud service, switchable on and off as needed…"

Demanding the right language

As in most human endeavours, assurance is largely a matter of using the right language. In an enterprise IT environment, the right language for service assurance is that of managers, not engineers. This isn’t to say that engineers don’t need information, but if they then have to report it to their managers.

Why not deliver that information in management language in the first place or in a simple and clear graphical format that anyone can understand?

Clarity of expression is something the IT industry has always struggled with. Engineers have traditionally been left holding the baby when it comes to translating technical language into something more accessible. 

The result is plainly evident in many service assurance tools, which are essentially technical data and terminologies thinly coated in an engineer’s notion of management language. In other words, they’re well-nigh unusable by managers or usable only down to a certain level, soon reached and below which lie the usual murky fathoms of techno-speak.

It isn’t easy to create a service assurance tool that converts technical information at every level of detail into comprehensible management language and information. None the less, this is what enterprises will want and as the cloud application market matures it’s hard to see them accepting anything less. Quality of service will increasingly be measured by quality of service performance information

"Engineers have traditionally been left ‘holding the baby’ when it comes to translating technical language into something more accessible"

Trust and independence

Effective service assurance also means being able to trust the information you’re given. This is a further argument for a single, industry-standard service assurance tool. A weakness of tools created by service providers themselves is that the information they provide may be perceived as not impartial, or not giving the whole picture. There will always be scope for suspicion that the tool serves the provider’s needs rather than those of the customer.

The importance of independence

A vital criterion for a service assurance tool should therefore be its independence from service provider control or influence. This is important for healthy customer relationships and supplier partnerships, and would be a win-win for all parties and an encouragement to enterprises considering whether to take to the cloud.

A logical extension of the trust issue is the provision of neutral ground on which customers and providers can meet and discuss matters of mutual interest. A standard service assurance tool, trusted throughout the service delivery chain, would have considerable value not just as a means of preventing or resolving disputes and misunderstandings.

The simple ability to share information would promote discussions and suggestions about improvements to service. In that sense, service assurance would also become a stimulus to better quality and innovation - another win-win for enterprises and service providers.

Conclusion

The future of enterprise IT is in the cloud, and because of the cloud’s invisibility, the future of cloud service provision depends largely on service assurance. Enterprises need proof that what they’re paying for is being delivered, and service providers will find it difficult to win or retain customers if they can’t provide such proof.

• In a cloud environment the ideal service assurance tool that enterprises should be looking for has these characteristics:
• It is easy for enterprise managers to use and understand.
• It provides primarily management information, though engineering information is there too.
• It integrates fully with all the IT the enterprise uses.
• It provides the same information to everyone in the service delivery chain.
• It is totally independent and impartial, and thus trusted by everyone.
• It has ‘plug-in’ capability so that services can easily be added.
• It is easy to buy as a cloud service in its own right.
• It is accepted as a universal industry standard.
• It saves time and adds significant value to enterprises.
• It helps service providers to sell services and retain customers

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