I see most organisations driving their digital strategy at one of the three different speeds, there are those that see digitisation as delivering strategies to drive operational efficiency, or those that are using digitisation to gather insights and provide the ultimate customer experience and finally those organisations that are able to disrupt and redefine industries by creating new business models enabled by digitisation.
Whichever one of those 3 you are, you’re probably using more and more apps to help you. You’ll lose your mind before you finish counting the number of applications on app stores like those of Apple and Android but in the UK, Workforce Productivity applications are the fastest growing type in this sector.
But enterprise applications don’t come free. A recent report suggests that up to 35% of IT budgets are spent on application quality assurance and testing and that’s up from 25% in a similar report published just two years earlier. The outlook doesn’t get better as that figure is expected to increase to 40% by 2018.
But why is Quality Assurance and testing so important and what is it. Well, when that application is the life blood of your organisation or the way in which your customers interact and buy from you then its failure could do considerable harm to any organisations brand and revenues. QA and testing ensures that functionality and usability is consistent across the many devices, operating systems and mobile operators as well as ensuring that the application is secure.
So when so much is spent on getting the application ready, why is so little thought given to how the application performs once it is unleashed? in a typical enterprise there will be a huge number of applications competing for bandwidth, for example your critical POS application maybe a distant second to the latest viral video on YouTube, so all that time and expense testing now seems a little wasted.
Good news, Cisco can help in a number of ways, first is to identify what applications are running on your network and this can be done by enabling several features on your Cisco infrastructure, namely Flexible Netflow and Network Based Application Recognition (NBARv2). You’ll then gain visibility of over 1,400 different applications enabling you to create, view and enforce a suitable application policy across your network using Cisco Prime.
The growing trend towards cloud hosted applications places further pressure on application performance as your WAN will introduce latency, well the same exercise can be repeated using your Cisco Router which can also apply acceleration capabilities as well as choose the best path over your multiple links. You can further optimise your web and mobile applications by extending Akamai Intelligent Platform directly into your branch all in one tidy box, at Cisco we call this an Intelligent WAN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9jyszAn8e0
So, if you are planning to introduce an application, or perhaps you are reviewing an existing project and performance is on the agenda then we would be delighted to help you.
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