From helpnetsecurity.com
Network performance, or the service quality of a business’ network, is critical to running a successful enterprise. Imagine the cost to an organization when the corporate network or the e-commerce site is down or experiencing unacceptable latency.
Customers get frustrated, prospects immediately turn away from purchases, and internally, IT and network admins are in a panic to get systems up and running again, fueled by C-suite pressure.
Defining today’s network performance
To optimize network performance, IT and network admins spend a large part of their day analyzing network statistics to identify areas of improvement and eliminate potential problems — before they happen. But improving network performance isn’t just maximizing speeds and feeds. It’s also about ensuring associated network and security tools are doing their jobs (for example, protecting the network) efficiently and not impacting service quality.
Now, as networks become more complex, the challenges and dangers also increase. As a result, network performance metrics traditionally used in the past — such as latency, bandwidth and responsiveness — are now insufficient to benchmark today’s high-speed, complex networks, which can cause a business to falter.