Cloud computing needs a new generation of network management tools
February 17, 2012
As more organisations move more of their computing into cloud-based services, maintaining the quality of network connections becomes more and more important – and, says Christopher Burrell, VPN manager of Vox Telecom, a new generation of network management tools is needed.
“Network performance is the single biggest factor that determines end-user experience and productivity,” says Burrell. “But finding the source of a network problem is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. It’s made worse by the fact that the issue may not be on your local network; it could be with your ISP, or with their upstream service provider, with an overseas link or even with the application itself.”…
The lack of certainty invariably leads to finger-pointing, he says: “The application developers blame the network manager who blames their ISP who blames Telkom who blames Seacom, and so on. We’ve only found one tool that can cut through the tangles, and that’s PathView Cloud.”
PathView Cloud enables managers to examine the entire network path from end to end in detail, says Burrell. “Any cloud service is only as good as the slowest point along the way,” he says. “If you can identify the bottlenecks, you know who to call.”
The network management service is itself cloud-based, adds Burrell, “which gives all the advantages of any cloud-based service: It’s easy to use and maintain, there’s no major capex spend and zero administration, and it can be deployed very quickly. Other systems can take a year to deploy, this can be up and running in a couple of days.”
Burrell says deploying the system within Vox Telecom itself has already improved its network management. “We can easily identify configuration errors and track bandwidth usage right down to the level of individual devices and users. We’ve had a couple of cases where we could previously have gone back and forth for weeks trying to find an error – we turned PathView Cloud onto it and instantly pinpointed a problem we could fix within minutes.”
The service has proved particularly useful when deploying new voice and hosted PBX solutions, adds Burrell. “It’s not always easy to tell whether a network is voice-ready,” he explains. “Now we can quickly assess the network and tell our customers exactly what needs to be done to ensure a successful voice implementation. It also makes maintaining quality of service much easier because we have complete insight into the network and application performance.”
“Giving our customers access to PathView Cloud means they’ll be able to monitor our performance too,” notes Burrell. “If a customer is paying for a premium service, they need to know they are getting the quality they expect. The more people adopt cloud-based services, the more important this kind of network monitoring and diagnostics will become; in fact, going forward, no IP service will be sold without PathView cloud.”