Cloud needs new tools

As organisations move their computing into cloud-based services, maintaining the quality of network connections becomes more and more important – and, says CHRISTOPHER BURELL of Vox Telecom, a new generation of network management tools is needed.
Network performance is thensingle biggest factor that determines end user experience and productivity. Butnfinding the source of a network problem is like finding the proverbial needlenin the haystack. It’s made worse by the fact that the issue may not be on yournlocal network; it could be with your ISP, or with their upstream servicenprovider, with an overseas link or even with the application itself.

The lack of certaintyninvariably leads to finger-pointing. The application developers blame thennetwork manager who blames their ISP who blames Telkom who blames Seacom, andnso on. We’ve only found one tool that can cut through the tangles, and that’snPathView Cloud.

PathView Cloud enablesnmanagers to examine the entire network path from end to end in detail. Anyncloud service is only as good as the slowest point along the way. If you cannidentify the bottlenecks, you know who to call.

The network management servicenis itself cloud-based, which gives all the advantages of any cloud-basednservice: It’s easy to use and maintain, there’s no major capex spend and zeronadministration, and it can be deployed very quickly. Other systems can take anyear to deploy, this can be up and running in a couple of days.

Deploying the system withinnVox Telecom itself has already improved its network management. We can easilynidentify configuration errors and track bandwidth usage right down to the levelnof individual devices and users. We’ve had a couple of cases where we couldnpreviously have gone back and forth for weeks trying to find an error – wenturned PathView Cloud onto it and instantly pinpointed a problem we could fixnwithin minutes.

The service has provednparticularly useful when deploying new voice and hosted PBX solutions. It’s notnalways easy to tell whether a network is voice ready. Now we can quickly assessnthe network and tell our customers exactly what needs to be done to ensure ansuccessful voice implementation. It also makes maintaining quality of servicenmuch easier because we have complete insight into the network and applicationnperformance.

Giving our customers access tonPathView Cloud means they’ll be able to monitor our performance too. If ancustomer is paying for a premium service, they need to know they are gettingnthe quality they expect. The more people adopt cloud-based services, the morenimportant this kind of network monitoring and diagnostics will become, in fact,ngoing forward, no IP service will be sold without PathView cloud.

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