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Customer experience initiatives will be integrated into the broader digital strategy according to a report on CX by Ecosystm. IT teams and frontline departments have to work together to impact how customers interact with the business, which means innovation and collaborations are crucial. 

Customers are judging the value delivered by a company based on solely their personal experience. 

They want exceptional experiences both online and offline, and their expectations have never been higher thanks to the normalising of on-demand services. 

This places additional IT pressure on top of the regular business operations, in order to keep up with the evolving needs of consumers.

On the backend, employees are relying on various platforms, applications and data to drive new user experience (UX). Greater demand in these business functions brings to light the importance of the network.

Learn more: networking MPLS

The use of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) in the past has served the basic IT needs.

With the entrance of cloud services, the wide area network (WAN) is becoming a complicated place. 

An enterprise HQ is no longer just connected to a few offices and data centres but a number of on-ramps from branch locations to the cloud. MPLS is deemed too slow and expensive to support this hybrid cloud environment.

Over the last few years, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) emerged as the ideal replacement for MPLS. 

This was the starting point for network transformation in enabling businesses to leverage new levels of performance, agility and intelligence when connecting their applications and services for end users globally.

Customer experience initiatives will be integrated into the broader digital strategy according to a report on CX by Ecosystm. IT teams and frontline departments have to work together to impact how customers interact with the business, which means innovation and collaborations are crucial. 

Customers are judging the value delivered by a company based on solely their personal experience. 

They want exceptional experiences both online and offline, and their expectations have never been higher thanks to the normalising of on-demand services. 

This places additional IT pressure on top of the regular business operations, in order to keep up with the evolving needs of consumers.

On the backend, employees are relying on various platforms, applications and data to drive new user experience (UX). Greater demand in these business functions brings to light the importance of the network.

Know more: networking MPLS

The use of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) in the past has served the basic IT needs.

With the entrance of cloud services, the wide area network (WAN) is becoming a complicated place. 

An enterprise HQ is no longer just connected to a few offices and data centres but a number of on-ramps from branch locations to the cloud. MPLS is deemed too slow and expensive to support this hybrid cloud environment.

Over the last few years, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) emerged as the ideal replacement for MPLS. 

This was the starting point for network transformation in enabling businesses to leverage new levels of performance, agility and intelligence when connecting their applications and services for end users globally.

the latest smart out-of-band management tools offer a positive way forward. Not only can they provide an alternative path to devic¬es located at remote sites when the primary network is down, helping mitigate the risk that SD-WAN can bring, they can also help facilitate access to edge infrastructure to ensure business continuity. Moreover, using a separate management plane solution allows organisations to securely monitor and access all devices without impacting normal operations.

In addition to providing access when an issue arises, SD-WAN also enables organisations to improve day to day operations. Proactive monitoring enables staff to pre-emptively recognise and remediate issues to reduce the need for truck rolls.

Designed to provide the needed resilience at the edge, Smart Out-of-Band by Opengear is scalable, providing the ability to manage infrastructure at distributed sites. Troubleshooting and remediation at the network’s edge enables organisations to detect faults before they become failures which minimises downtime and operating costs.

This resilient backup connectivity allows enterprises to reduce the time-consuming nature of dispatching engineers to data centre sites to make configuration changes and trouble-shoot issues for business continuity. Smart Out-of-Band and Failover to Cellular™ ensures that SD-WAN continues to operate when all other circuits are unavailable, providing the always-on access needed at the edge.”

Like most SD-WAN-based solutions, Cato’s platform works at the edge of the network, where the LAN connects to the public internet, to access cloud or other services. As with other SD-WAN offerings, the edge must connect to something beyond the four walls of the private network. In Cato’s case, the company has created a global, geographically distributed private backbone, which is connected via multiple network providers. In essence, Cato has built a private cloud that can be reached over the public internet.

That global private backbone incorporates the elements of SASE and brings forth fully converged networking and security to each edge connection. Cato makes that possible with the Cato Socket, Cato’s SD-WAN device. The Socket is a physical appliance (or virtual one for the cloud) that routes all traffic from the edge to the closest cato PoP (Point of Presence). There are more than 50 cato PoPs, and those POPs share the data-center footprint of the major cloud providers, meaning that not only is there a Cato POP close to all major business centers worldwide, but that latency from Cato to your cloud provider is likely to be nominal at most. Cato’s global routing optimization significantly reduces latency when compared with the public Internet. Throughput is also improved by the WAN optimization built-into the Cato software.

With the core security and networking processing occurring in the Cato Cloud, the Cato Socket brings enough networking capabilities to overcome last-mile issues and bring the traffic into the nearest Cato PoP. The device implements QoS prioritization, which can be driven by applications, users and other definable elements. The Socket also institutes other traffic management capabilities, such as dynamic path selection and the ability to connect to a mix of fiber, cable, XDSL, 4G/LTE and MPLS connections.

Users can now create and track multiple performance metrics from a single SLA. Custom metrics can now be added to SLAs, allowing for additional performance measurements. Create custom metrics using filters, and control precisely what ticket states should count against individual SLA metrics. 

A few examples: 

• Track vendor response time when a ticket status is set to Waiting on Vendor
• Track response time globally, by team, or by individual agent
• Create metrics that apply to tickets based on priority level
• Create a metric for that applies to tickets where a spare device has been issued

SLA based services are services that are based on a service level agreement (SLA). This is a contract between a service provider and the end user that sets out the level of service that the service provider is expected to offer. They define what the customer is going to receive in exchange for their money, although not how the service will be delivered.