Corporate networks are growing increasingly complex. As this growth raises security, performance, and visibility concerns, many organizations have turned to network management solutions for help.
At least 70% of companies today have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one. As these businesses incorporate more digital technologies, it can become difficult to ensure they use their network resources efficiently. Network management helps by bringing administration, operations, maintenance, security, and automation together to make it easier to manage these environments.
Network management providers have helped many of the world’s leading companies optimize their network performance, transparency, and security. These seven case studies show how:
1. Yelp
Yelp is a leading review platform, helping an average of 92 million mobile users daily. With such a large and consistent user base, ensuring network uptime is a critical consideration for the company.
The global Yelp team uses more than 30 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps across its organization to provide its services and maintain productivity. The company also relies on a distributed remote workforce that must be able to access these tools quickly from across the globe. To provide this connectivity and ensure all apps work as they should, Yelp tracks their performance with AppNeta’s network monitoring tools.
Yelp uses AppNeta to deliver real-time insights into various apps’ performance. This visibility lets IT managers find and respond to potential issues quickly, resolving them before they affect network performance too heavily. Active network testing tools help them identify bottlenecks and other inefficiencies even when they’re not immediately evident, which helps to optimize uptime and performance.
Industry: Business reviews and search
Network management solution: AppNeta
Outcomes:
- Faster diagnosis of network issues
- Identify faulty software and vendors in network
- Maximized SaaS apps’ performance to enable higher productivity from remote teams
2. Mitsubishi Motors North America
Mitsubishi is a recognizable brand in the automotive industry with growing customer demand for for electric vehicles. As its North American segment expanded across the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, the company needed a more flexible and reliable IT environment for its IT and service departments.
In addition to managing a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network, Mitsubishi Motors North America (MMNA) has roughly 600 employees using voice over internet protocol (VoIP). MMNA uses network management solutions from Netreo to ensure visibility and high performance across these systems.
While MPLS offers more scalability, it can create performance and visibility problems without proper management. Netreo’s solution lets MMNA centralize this network, combining device usage and traffic management to make it easier to adjust to real-time demands and issues. Similarly, network management tools allow them to adjust routers and switches as necessary to maximize VoIP performance for better call quality.
Industry: Auto sales and distribution
Network management solution: Netreo
Outcomes:
- Gained a single view across the entire network
- Lowered cost of ownership through virtual servers and agentless, clientless infrastructure
- Optimized VoIP and MPLS performance
3. Dell Services
Dell Services has provided industry-leading IT services and solutions for more than two decades to more than a thousand global clients. As its customer base grew, the company needed to manage more customer networks while ensuring its internal resources remained productive without any additional personnel.
To meet these growing demands, Dell opted for a single network monitoring solution across both its customer-facing and internal operations. Teams initially used three separate detection and reporting platforms, which made it difficult to gain full visibility and resulted in redundant network traffic. By switching to a single, comprehensive solution, Dell was able to reduce traffic and simplify its complex network management operations.
With the new, consolidated solution, Dell can manage its 4,800 network devices from a single point of access without impacting network performance. This simplification made it easier to troubleshoot issues and reduced network overhead, enabling greater scalability. The resulting time savings streamlined employee onboarding and training, too.
Industry: IT services
Network management solution: Entuity
Outcomes:
- Reduced operational costs from lower maintenance and training needs
- Streamlined network troubleshooting and onboarding for new clients and employees
- Increased available network capacity to customers by lowering overhead
4. FIATC Seguros
FIATC Seguros is the second-largest mutual insurer in Spain, with more than 50 branches across the nation. During its growth over the past few decades, the company developed core business apps and customer services with various programming languages and databases, resulting in disconnected, complex networks.
With more than 30 million lines of code and high customization, rewriting key apps wasn’t an option, so FIATC turned to network management instead. The company migrated to a newer, distributed environment to reduce physical restraints and complications. Virtualization also provided a single platform to access all network resources.
Thanks to these network management upgrades, FIATC can run business intelligence (BI) tools across all its data simultaneously, getting the most out of these services. Moving away from on-premises solutions also reduced operating costs and maintenance.
Industry: Insurance
Network management solution: Micro Focus
Outcomes:
- Reduced batch processing time by 30%
- 70% reduction in operating expenses
- Removed siloes and simplified environments to use just two programming languages
5. CreditCall
Electronic payments have soared in the past few years, resulting in substantial growth for companies like CreditCall. CreditCall, which develops and manages payment gateway services across multiple channels, needs continuous monitoring of over 200 servers and other equipment across several countries. Network management is a critical component of enabling that monitoring.
CreditCall turned to management services from Opsview to enable fully distributed monitoring, helping it manage its vast, geographically dispersed network. Flexible reporting tools and dashboards provide a consolidated view across the entire IT network. Since data visualization simplifies and improves forecasting, these tools also enable easier, more effective predictive analytics.
This insight and control let CreditCall ensure network uptime across all its devices and servers, providing more value to customers. Similarly, they can optimize their own internal operations by identifying and resolving inefficiencies faster.
Industry: Payments
Network management solution: Opsview
Outcomes:
- Gained a single, real-time view across more than 200 network devices and servers
- Streamlined integration with third-party reporting tools
- Simplified network monitoring to enable more uptime and faster issue resolution
6. City of Williamsburg
Network management has also brought tangible benefits to government initiatives. The city of Williamsburg, Virginia, is one of the oldest municipalities in the state, but it recently undertook a vast modernization project. As part of this modernization, the city wanted to improve the availability and performance of all government departments’ digital services, requiring network management.
City IT workers previously relied on manual tools like Excel, making it difficult to provide the agility necessary for applications like emergency services and health care access. Now, the city uses a network management system from Auvik to host and control these apps in a hyper-converged virtual environment.
Consolidating and modernizing the network lets government agencies automate routine tasks like inventory and documentation. Network operations are also now standard across departments, which enables easier collaboration and streamlines workloads for IT staff. A single source of truth lets teams respond to potential issues faster, ensuring technical problems don’t interfere with critical government operations.
Industry: Government
Network management solution: Auvik
Outcomes:
- Real-time visibility reduced troubleshooting time from days to minutes
- Proactive warnings enabled faster responses, preventing disruption of critical services
- Automated IT asset management to reduce manual workloads and save time
7. O’Neill
Since its founding in 1952, O’Neill has become a dominant force in surfing and surf apparel. Throughout its long, successful history, the company has embraced digital transformation, eventually requiring solutions to monitor and control its increasingly complex network across multiple countries.
O’Neill had to manage multiple sites with interconnecting networks, which became increasingly difficult. As infrastructure costs rose and visibility shrank, the brand turned to network management to optimize and future-proof its IT operations. The solution was a purpose-built platform for distributed networks that enabled teams to manage all sites simultaneously and look at each one individually.
The company now has enough visibility to collect usage data across all devices on its network. IT teams have a single point of access to view latency, disk utilization, bandwidth usage, and more. With these insights, they can adapt accordingly to make the most of their network resources, ensuring smoother internal operations.
Industry: Sports apparel
Network management solution: Progress WhatsUp Gold
Outcomes:
- Gained actionable intelligence into all separate parts of the network
- Consolidated monitoring, alerting, mapping, and reporting systems across locations into a single platform
- Found an optimal balance between the total cost of ownership and multi-site infrastructure management
