The Perks of Unifying Network Monitoring and Management for the WAN Edge
Sales Engineer
September 6, 2018
Gartner estimates that the average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 p/minute, which extrapolates to just over $300K p/hour. A large financial impact for any organization. To further highlight the impact, here is a video about the hidden costs and business implications of IT downtime.
IT leaders and CIOs acknowledge the importance of constant network and security monitoring to provide visibility, and even automation, to resolve events that lead to network downtime. As a result, most enterprises will identify that they have a number of network management and monitoring tools in place to help them see, mitigate and resolve issues.
However, there is a caveat. As disruptive technologies and transformations, like multi-cloud and IoT, have become more pervasive, the enterprise wide area network has become increasingly more complex. Managing, monitoring and securing the enterprise WAN and cloud, with multiple products and platforms, has created an overly complicated and bloated tool infrastructure that is prohibiting IT from moving forward with cloud-like agility. This complexity impacts IT responsiveness and flexibility to manage change.
Because of these challenges, an integrated, unified and centralized approach to enterprise WAN, security and cloud connectivity is indispensable for management and visibility of today’s digital enterprises.
The Benefits of a Unified Network Monitoring and Management System
As the boundary of the enterprise WAN becomes more distributed and complex, there is a growing need for solutions that tightly integrate networking, security and policy management. The combination of these functions is intrinsic and highly valuable to the fabric of the network itself. A comprehensive single pane-of-glass solution is ideal to simplify the configuration, policy management and monitoring of networking, security and cloud gateway services for the WAN edge. This unification of the entire enterprise WAN estate can significantly reduce time-to-detection and resolution for IT networking and security, ultimately reducing the impact of downtime.
Compared to multiple siloed tools, a unified approach to network monitoring and management provides an easier and better solution to configure and deploy end-to-end services. An integrated approach reduces the number of elements that IT must interface with, thus simplifying and improving e operations, and project execution and diminishing recurring licensing costs.
Most importantly, an integrated and unified single-pane-of-glass approach ensures that network and security WAN edge admin teams spend less time worrying about the inter-operability of various tools. The enterprise network has become bloated with a mixture of numerous, and overlapping single point tools and products. The last thing IT needs is to throw, yet another, disparate tool into their ever-growing management and control infrastructure.
Versa Director Provides a Unified Approach to End-to-end WAN and Cloud Edge Management
Versa Director is a component of Versa’s Secure Cloud IP Platform architecture. Versa Director provides the essential management, monitoring and orchestration capabilities needed to deliver Versa’s software-defined network and security services and third-party virtual services. This central portal simplifies and automates the Versa Secure Cloud IP software platform, including the creation, delivery, management and operations of SD-WAN, SD-Security, SD-Branch, and Cloud Gateway services.
Key Versa Director features:
- Fully Integrated with Network Functions and Security: Versa Director is the single-pane-of-glass interface to Versa’s networking and security services software suite, which software defines enterprise edge networking and security infrastructure. An advantage Versa Director has over legacy management is its ability to unify control, configuration, provisioning, deploying and monitoring into a single portal view. This provides a holistic view of the entire enterprise WAN and Cloud edge.
- Single Pane of Management: Centralized management and monitoring of networking and security across all sites and tenants, from a single portal, eases IT operations.
- Configuration & Policy Templates: Workflow templates for device, application services, security, and networking, simplify and accelerate the design and deployment process across multiple services.
- Real-time Monitoring: 24/7 monitoring integrated with robust policies for auto-healing maximizes uptime.
- Role-Based Access for Enhanced Secure Control Management: Enable visibility and control for each customer, department, IT or branch manager with RBAC and SSO support with SAML and Microsoft Active Directory integration.
- No Additional Licensing Cost: Versa Director is bundled with the Versa Secure Cloud IP Platform. Enterprises can now leverage a monitoring system that is integrated with their WAN edge infrastructure for SD-WAN or SD-Branch architecture, without having to worry about licensing, renewal, or upgrades of a third-party tool.
To summarize, the unified system and portal for network and security management, and monitoring of Versa Director simplifies the increasingly difficult tasks of managing, controlling and viewing the WAN and Cloud edge, while keeping complexity and cost low. Enterprise IT can gain increased visibility and control over the enterprise WAN estate and ensure seamless service delivery, and significantly lower time-to-resolution and detection to resolve network issues and address security events.
Get to know more about Versa Director– access the data sheet or just reach out to us for a demo.
