The workplace, and the tools employees use to communicate and collaborate, have changed substantially in recent years. Enterprise organizations are rapidly adopting cloud-native technologies and services to enhance user experiences, enable hybrid work, and improve scalability.
However, this means many business leaders, particularly those responsible for larger organizations, are managing ever-more complex technology environments. They’re juggling multiple unified communication and collaboration tools, alongside legacy systems, and new investments.
“Managing a hybrid UC environment in a large enterprise is challenging due to the complexity of integrating diverse systems and technologies,” says John Ruthven, CEO at IR.
“According to research by Ecosystm, 35% of employees continue to face technology issues. Without a comprehensive view, identifying and resolving issues becomes difficult, leading to a whole range of disruptions that reduce productivity, cause frustration, and ultimately end up impacting an organizations bottom line.”
To ensure they’re enabling excellent user experiences, enhancing productivity and efficiency, and keeping costs low; while investing in the right technologies, business leaders need end-to-end visibility. Here’s how you can improve your insights into your hybrid ecosystem.
The Importance of Visibility in a Hybrid Environment
In today’s workplace, employees are reliant on a wide range of tools that help them to stay productive and connected with their colleagues. Unfortunately, in a hybrid landscape, where cloud and legacy solutions need to work seamlessly together, system observability can be a challenge.
A lack of comprehensive insight into various connected tools and services leads to significant problems for business leaders. Productivity and employee satisfaction can suffer, as IT teams fail to effectively monitor and resolve poor call quality and downtime amongst tools. Additionally, business leaders can encounter problems with compliance, due to a lack of visibility into how data is managed in an ecosystem.
To make matters worse, companies often suffer from higher operational costs, as lack of automation and proper monitoring forces IT staff to spend a lot of time on manual provisioning, maintenance, and reactive problem solving.
How to Improve End-to-End Visibility
To overcome the challenges outlined above, and maintain true visibility into a hybrid ecosystem, companies need to invest in two things: monitoring, and observability.
Monitoring tools allow organizations to take a proactive approach to observing a system’s performance in real-time. Solutions like those offered by IR, allow companies to collect and analyze performance data, translate that data into real-time insights, and use those insights to proactively mitigate issues.
Observability solutions, on the other hand, ensure companies can leverage the data and insights produced by monitoring for a deeper understanding of the whole system, and continuously evaluate its performance.
A full monitoring, observability, and performance management solution allows companies to pinpoint the source of issues quickly, even in a complex hybrid environment, from a single location. This helps IT teams resolve problems faster before they impact employees and business performance.
Implementing a Comprehensive Visibility Strategy
Every organization embracing a hybrid environment for communication and collaboration will have their own goals to address, and challenges to overcome. To ensure you’re making the most of your ecosystem, and mitigating issues consistently, you’ll need to:
1. Understand Your Ecosystem
Different platforms and tools used in the modern business landscape will require different approaches to both observability and monitoring. Before you begin implementing tools for end-to-end visibility, it’s important to get a clear view of the tools your employees use, the components, dependencies, and functionality of different platforms, and the workloads that run on each platform.
Assessing everything from the use cases for each platform, to the performance characteristics of the system, such as resource utilization and limitations, will help you determine exactly what you should be monitoring on a consistent level.
Remember, most IT platforms in a hybrid landscape generate huge volumes of data, but not all that data will be useful based on your specific needs and goals. Based on your assessment, select an observability solution that allows you to filter data close to its source, at various levels, to avoid overwhelming your teams with too much information.
2. Automate Proactive Monitoring
Maintaining end-to-end visibility into your entire ecosystem manually would be complex for any business. In the enterprise landscape, where there are various tools and resources to track, manual monitoring can cause significant issues with productivity and efficiency.
Implementing a solution for automated monitoring reduces the time-consuming and resource-intensive process of manual monitoring. These solutions can help businesses to reduce costs (minimizing the need for additional IT employees), minimize human error, and reduce risk.
Plus, because automated monitoring systems consistently capture data, they ensure companies can gain the end-to-end insights they need to improve reporting, make better business decisions, enhance employee experiences, and overcome compliance concerns.
3. Customize Your Monitoring and Observability Strategy
Finally, as mentioned above, every organization’s communication ecosystem will have unique components, particularly for companies embracing a hybrid environment. The right observability and monitoring platform should give you the freedom to customize your experience based on your specific needs. For instance, with an intelligent monitoring solution from IR, companies can configure alerts and notifications based on their specific challenges and needs.
Machine learning models can automatically prioritize specific incident data, filter out unnecessary alerts, and keep teams up to date on issues impacting the system. A custom approach to notifications and alerts also reduces the amount of time IT teams spend on unnecessary tasks.
Additionally, IR’s solution gives companies further opportunities to customize their approach to end-to-end visibility, with bespoke dashboards. The system allows you to specifically track metrics crucial to your company’s operations, making it easier for IT departments to make the most of their data.
Ensuring End-to-End Visibility in your Hybrid Environment
Hybrid communication and collaboration environments are becoming increasingly common among larger enterprises, that need to retain existing technologies, while leveraging the benefits of new, cloud-based tools. However, maintaining comprehensive visibility into these platforms can be complex, harming productivity, performance, and user experience.
A comprehensive set of monitoring and observability tools, such as those offered by IR Collaborate, can help companies unify their monitoring and observability strategy, creating better quality data, optimal user experiences, and opportunities to enhance software performance.
“Ensuring seamless communication and collaboration requires end-to-end visibility and observability,” says Ruthven.
“By ensuring all components of the UC environment work harmoniously, organizations can maintain high performance, enhance user experience, and achieve operational excellence.”
With IR’s ecosystem, companies can consistently monitor all of their communications tools in one unified location, then troubleshoot and find the root cause of problems, for fast issue resolution. What’s more, because the solution gives users a unified dashboard for end-to-end visibility, it helps streamline IT processes and operations across the business environment.
