Whether you were at CA World ’14 or caught up via Twitter and by watching the keynotes online, you’ve probably heard a lot about the implications of the application economy and why it should matter to your company. But from the perspective of being your company’s network expert, guru, super freak, what does that really mean? Why does being app-driven matter?

It starts with you

For many of you, the enterprise network is often ignored by the business or has a permanent membership on your CIO’s cost-cutting list. Doing more with less comes to mind.

Unless the network is being blamed for a serious outage that directly impaired a strategic initiative, it isn’t often included in a strategic discussion among C-level executives. Now’s the time to change how CIO’s and the business view the enterprise network. And it starts with you.

The network is the nervous system and you’re the brain surgeon

A leading analyst firm said it best, “To most, the network is probably less exciting than all the other high profile projects like mobility, big data and cloud. Yet the enterprise network represents the vital underpinning for all these projects and increasingly evolves into a business-critical asset for companies looking to succeed in the age of customer. It becomes the nervous system of the digital business.”

If that’s the case, think of yourself as being an equivalent of a brain surgeon. What you do is not only connected to the business, but important to the overall functioning of the business.

If your business is driven by applications that deliver revenue-generating, brand-impacting, reputation enhancing services, then how you manage the network should take into consideration the health and performance of these applications. Rethink your approach, if managing the network mostly means all or some of the following:

• Doing more with less
• Bracing yourself for the next outage
• Avoiding being the target for blame
• Pursuing or maintaining your availability metric, independent of business objectives.

A few things to help you start thinking in a more app-driven way when managing the performance of your network:

• Invest in and manage network resources based on business priorities, not consumption levels
• Validate end-to-end performance of business-critical applications across your network
• Focus on network KPIs that impact end-user experience and business outcomes.

Get out of your comfort zone

Easy right? I doubt that, but in order to be valued and viewed as part of your company’s business strategy, you have to emerge from your comfort zone of packets, flows and routers to understand the business of your company. It’s not enough to know that your network is overburdened and may require additional optimization and or investments.

What objectives are you optimizing against? How do you prove that additional investments are necessary? Why is doing more with less not feasible? It seems like there are more questions than answers. In my experience, asking the right questions is often more critical than having answers. What’s the use of having answers to the wrong questions?

How CA can help

In order to answer critical questions that support business outcomes, you have to have access to information that help you answer these questions.

At CA World ’14, this concept was demonstrated vigorously by many of our customers and partners such as Cisco Systems. Companies like Cisco Systems leverage our App-Driven Network Performance Management solution to find answers the aforementioned questions for their businesses.

Being able to answer questions that help elevate your overall credibility to the business, improve your collaboration with other IT teams, and help you plan for resource requirements to successfully launch new business initiatives shine the light on the criticality of the enterprise network and its role in the application economy.

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