When workloads are distributed across cloud, data centre and on-premises environments, application performance and resilience is a make-or-break issue.

Every IT team is well aware that if access to an app goes down, it can stop employees working, cause mission-critical parts of the organisation to grind to a halt, and impact badly on the customer experience.

Although huge app crashes like this are a rare occurrence, there’s an equally critical – but more hidden – effect happening. As networks creak under the strain of supporting apps in a distributed environment, app performance is often hit in ways that are hard to identify. 

This can have a cumulative, serious effect on operations.

Within this scenario, IT teams can solve what they think are individual problems cropping up in different areas. They can meet all their traditional service level agreements (SLAs), and every red-amber-green indicator can be a steady green. 

However, this surface fix isn’t always an absolute fix. Sometimes, there’s a larger, underlying problem causing these apparently individual issues – but the current level of performance insight just can’t identify it. So the ‘individual’ issues rumble on. 

And because experience service level agreements (XSLAs) are rare, there’s no incentive for providers to approach services on a more holistic basis.

In support of app performance, some organisations look to SD-WAN to improve the flexibility of routing and path selections. But many find SD-WAN isn’t saving costs or transforming performance as they expected, often because the underlay it’s paired with isn’t performing as well as it could. 

It’s also hard to ensure a consistent, high quality end-to-end app performance with variable internet latency from multiple hops across different ISPs. And reduced visibility and control over app performance make it harder to diagnose the root cause of the problem.

Similarly, when considering cloud connectivity, you need to think about how cloud provider SLAs align with networking SLAs, and how you create a solution that is aligned on outcomes. 

This is further compounded by increasingly complex multi-cloud solutions. These require a much deeper understanding of the connections between the cloud, and a knowledge of how to assure performance when unexpected situations occur.

At the bottom of all these application performance issues is one simple fact – the underlying network wasn’t designed to support the emerging, distributed, workload environment.

When organisations move completely into a distributed environment, they need to be confident they can rely on the performance and resilience of their applications. 

So what capabilities should IT teams be looking for from any network evolution?

A DIY approach combined with basic metric reporting on latency, jitter and packet loss isn’t enough if you’re supporting big data and distributed workloads. You need two things above all: 

• the right skills, resources and tooling
• the right partner, to help you understand where and what to invest in.

Organisations know this, so they’re looking to shift their monitoring from passive to active, using availability and performance information that can only come from seeing the app’s complete delivery pathway. 

This will involve combining hyperscaler insight data, more detailed monitoring data, and machine learning and anomaly detection techniques. It will also require automated methods to discover and map network and app structures, and any flows across the complete app path. 

It’ll be vital, too, to incorporate diagnostics and repair processes to enable near real-time fault detection. 

On a more macro scale, this insight will enable IT teams to spot apps that aren't hosted in the best place, and even to identify purchased capacity that’s no longer needed.

Organisations are operating in an environment where business priorities can change fast, and many face the task of migrating a huge volume of legacy apps to the cloud. 

IT teams want a rapid, easy process that will allow them to site apps wherever they best fit with business goals and outcomes – and then action the necessary shifts quickly. 

Optimising operational performance can also involve adopting multiple clouds in multiple regions, and then moving apps into or within them. Genuinely easy app migration services need to be integrated into the organisation’s own workflow tools via effective APIs.

However, this greater flexibility in terms of where apps are hosted can be hampered by regulations for data storage and processing. They vary from country to country. A banking organisation might not want their data leaving Switzerland, for example, and would need the capability to site apps quickly in that domain. 

It takes time and expertise to navigate the implications of moving an app from one jurisdiction to another, particularly when the governing regulatory landscape is continually shifting. Which is why organisations want a network that can work well in this scenario.

Our new global network is a programmable platform that delivers networking services to the cloud and between the clouds, whether public or private. 

It will bring increased speed and flexibility to network changes, opening up new levels of responsiveness. Larger organisations that were traditionally slower to adapt than smaller competitors will now have a network that’s no longer a drag on their speed of change.

Global Fabric will offer enhanced end-to-end monitoring, giving you the visibility and control you need to make better decisions, and address issues on your network quickly and intelligently. It’ll provide a step change in analysis and monitoring, backed up by robust SLAs to the cloud and between clouds.

Importantly, it will include support for XSLAs. 

Just as Global Fabric represents the next level in networking, XSLAs mark a significant advancement in contractual accountability. By being aspirational and outcomes-based, they integrate context and emotion into performance analysis.

XSLAs are crucial to Global Fabric’s intent to transform cloud networking, because they measure what’s core to Global Fabric’s success: supporting reliable app performance.

To keep app performance strong, traffic can be automatically re-routed to an equally efficient non-faulty path when issues arise. This will keep apps running, employees working effectively, and end customers served and satisfied – all without degradation in service.

And when the organisation wants to adapt and respond to market changes, Global Fabric will be right there, with the ability to stand-up services in minutes.

For the first time, you'll be able to use embedded monitoring capabilities to look at predictive performance before you select routes or buy services. 

Global Fabric will also offer optional ways to build end-to-end observability across multi-clouds. This will extend from the end-user device, all the way through the LAN, WAN and within the hyperscaler environment. 

It’s easy to split hosting geographically to achieve best performance. And you'll be able to move your workloads from one hyperscaler to another at the press of a button – if your app migration process supports that.

We recognise that organisations will want different levels of management support with Global Fabric so, again, we’re building flexibility into this area. You can either hand management over to us completely, use our tools to manage your usage in-house, or opt for a hybrid approach – it’s up to you.

Ready to find out more about Global Fabric? Contact us today to talk to an expert.