With digital transformation in full swing, it’s important to keep your organization’s network fighting fit. As one of your organization’s strategic assets, the network is vital to the success of the business. Your network is also all encompassing, transmitting all the data your employees access to maintain the business and potentially allowing customers and partners to connect as well.  The network expands from the data center, to the campus, and all the way to the network edge. Something so important and vast can certainly pose quite a challenge to manage.

Your organization needs a better way to manage the network to fully prepare for the effects of digital transformation. A quality management suite needs to be capable of easily enforcing network policies to cut down on administrative tasks and include top-of-the-line network security, with intelligent monitoring that can identify network security issues before they begin. Overall, a management solution needs to be easy to use and comprehensive, allowing the collection of network analytics, network visibility, and granular control.

How Does Analytics, Visibility and Granular Control Make Managing the Network Easier?

As an example, Toi Ohomai selected Extreme Management Center to assist in their efforts to provide education and training to over 15,000 students and staff.

“Our IT administrators will have a single pane of glass for management and a better picture of what is going on across the entire network. We also expect to see a significant reduction in service requests with better access to the network for students, staff and guest users.” – Rabindra Das, Head of Information Technology at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology

As the largest tertiary education provider in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, Toi Ohomai utilizes Extreme Management Center’s fully integrated solution to future proof their network. Today, the IT team at Toi Ohomai can enjoy a great amount of security, visibility, and control on their network, allowing them to prepare for the ever-changing future of education. Extreme also implemented several advanced capabilities, such as optimized operations and fast troubleshooting improving learning outcomes for their students. These capabilities will be used to introduce new mobile apps, IoT, location-based capabilities, and more technology that will enhance the experience of students on campus.

“However, the icing on the cake is the capability to leverage Extreme Networks software, both in security and analytics, and the additional services we will be able to deliver for student and staff support in the future.” – Rabindra Das, Head of Information Technology at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology

6 Must Haves to Get Insights, Analytics and Security

When selecting a solution that gives your business insights into your network, enables you to use analytics for visibility and security across the network, you need 6 must-have features:

1. A 360° View Across Users, Devices, Locations, Apps, and Networks
   The solution should provide a powerful, single database that provides real-time insights from the access edge to the data center. It offers a single pane of glass that can seamlessly integrate automation, visibility, and control to know what’s going on in your entire network and keep it secure. This will ultimately optimize operations and help monetize your network. To complete the 360° view, it should enable flexible grouping and filtering for reporting and large-scale editing, allowing a straightforward way to optimize your organization’s workflows.
2. Full Lifecycle Management in One Platform
   The solution should allow control over the design and intent of your network from deployment to optimization. It also needs to provide data-driven insights into the network and the applications within, in addition to user and device activities. Harnessing the power of these insights will mitigate performance issues, remediate issues, and ultimately allow your network to perform at the highest standard possible.
3. Deep Application Insights with Thousands of Fingerprints
   To attain the highest levels of analytics, visibility, and control, your solution needs to combine flow-based technology with thousands of application fingerprints. This synthesis will allow your network to address a wide variety of technology issues, from measuring and solving problems with the quality of user experience, to controlling applications and traffic, all the way to providing a springboard for innovative pricing strategies.
4. Integration with Ecosystem Partners Using a Rich Set of APIs
   Allowing your organization to utilize a variety of APIs ensures your clients can perform a variety of services on your network without ever leaving it. From security to Mobile Device Management, integrating APIs facilitates a wide variety of technology solutions. Using APIs, your organization can reduce development time and cost, and mitigate the risk of network-breaking errors – adding value to your organization’s network.
5. Security and Compliance to Avoid Breaches and Penalties
   Granular end-point control helps make real-time security decisions. These insights allow your IT department to easily enforce policies across the entire network infrastructure to improve quality of service and bandwidth, and reduces the risk of deploying BYOD and IoT.
6. Industry’s Best Service and Support
   When something on your network is amiss, it’s imperative to solve the issue as soon as possible. At Extreme, we have a strong commitment to providing the best support possible, distinctly reducing confusion and frustration when your network isn’t working the way it should. Over 94% of support calls are resolved by the first network specialist who answered the call. Our commitment to high quality support hasn’t been ignored – our 100% insourced team of technical specialists is rated #1 in service and support by our customers.

Make sure you keep these 6 network management must-haves in mind when comparing network management solutions from vendors.

Want to know more about how Extreme can address your network management needs to foster a competitive advantage for your organization?

• Read: Extreme Management Center: 6 Things You Need to Know
• Watch: Insights, Visibility, and Control: A Deep Dive into Extreme Management Center
• Visit: ExtremeApplications – Extreme Management Center

This post was originally published by Marketing Communications Co-Op Liz Krupa.