Users don’t want excuses when it comes to digital experiences. They expect their devices, apps, and services to work, period. And these experiences matter; When they fail to meet expectations, the success, reputation and brand identity of every modern organization is at risk.
But as the reach of IT teams grows to encompass truly global area networks, it’s harder than ever to achieve consistently great experiences. In today’s hyper-distributed environment, it is impossible to create and operate secure and reliable digital experiences when teams are forced to work across multiple platforms with disparate tools and incompatible solutions. It is a recipe for experiencing disaster.
Fortunately, there is a way forward. With smarter, data-driven platforms that not only provide visibility into owned and non-owned infrastructure, but also effectively enforce security and access policies for each user and continually work to optimize network performance, IT teams can deliver on the promise of truly resilient infrastructure and more resilient businesses.
What is digital resilience?
Over the past year, I’ve heard CIOs and CISOs discuss the importance of digital resilience. Particularly in an environment where many IT leaders control less than half of their infrastructure (think direct Internet connectivity, cloud platforms, SaaS, and remote workers using their own devices), it’s important to look at our infrastructure from a different perspective.
The power of this global area network comes at a cost: many more network hops across local, service provider, Internet, and cloud connections. With digital resilience, network administrators can regain control of the experience as it traverses the parts of the network they own, as well as the parts they don’t.
That’s what digital resilience really means: ensuring security, reliability and a consistently excellent user experience, in the face of any disruption, across your organization’s entire digital footprint. Below is how three different Cisco customers are turning this challenge into an invaluable reality.
Redefining high-design retail
When the pandemic hit, home furnishings retailer Accommodation and food took on the ultimate interior design challenge. Because many customers were unwilling to shop in person, the company’s free in-store design services needed a digital makeover, and quickly.
The solution was more than just a coat of paint. Room & Board brought back the wow factor for its customers by creating a remote shopping experience as engaging as the real thing. Store employees now take customers on virtual tours of options using interactive tablets to display furniture as they walk through the showroom.
To get a better idea of how this experience really plays out, Room & Board relies on Cisco Thousand Eyes for complete visibility into every network connection and every device. IT can now see traffic and application performance in domains beyond the company’s direct control that are vital to the seamless delivery of its 3D and virtual design services.
“Being able to monitor, understand, correlate and track those experiences eliminates that uncertainty,” said Mark Rodrigue, senior network engineer at Room & Board.
With AI-powered intelligence monitoring operations in 22 stores in 12 states, Mark and his team have truly reshaped their business and their customers’ living spaces.
Largely eliminating network complexity and high overhead
IT management in Aldoba―a chain of 740 Mexican restaurants in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico― had outsourced the company’s network to a third party. It was a complex and expensive combination of switches, firewalls, access points and Wi-Fi controllers from multiple vendors that was difficult to manage and secure.
For Qdoba, that complexity put the business at risk. To serve staff and customers, they needed a more resilient and reliable network experience combined with delicious Mexican food. The answer? A unified networking, security and data platform centralized in one cloud-based solution, all managed by just two Qdoba IT administrators.
Qdoba solution unifies networking and security solutions in a tightly integrated environment secure access service edge (SASE) Solution managed in a single Cisco panel. It enables consistent application of policies and automatic security measures wherever users and devices connect on Qdoba’s global area network. Administrators gain complete visibility into customer behavior, smart device profiling, and the ability to transparently and securely connect any user to any application in a zero-trust model.
Now, Qdoba IT can focus on information coming from the platform faster and with fewer staff. Compared to the old outsourced network, its digitally resilient network costs $300,000 less per year. Savor this savings along with their spiciest sauces!
Great experiences take off at multinational travel agency
With travel and booking information at everyone’s fingertips, the travel agency business has become incredibly competitive. Flight Center Travel Groupwhich serves clients in 26 countries, has had to be agile and adaptable to survive. During the pandemic, when travel was restricted, hundreds of office closures and 75% staff cuts made the company even more reliant on technology to provide a great customer experience and remain competitive.
With a small IT team and a 37% smaller budget, Flight Center moved from on-premises applications to software as a service (SaaS) to reduce overhead. For the first time, its business depended on application performance beyond its own data center. The viability of the business was at stake.
“Today we have customers who can sit down and shop at the agent counter in real time from their mobile phone using our competitors’ websites,” said Chris Locke, CIO. “That’s why we need to… deliver high-performance applications because our consultants need to be able to answer questions quickly.”
Flight Center IT chose Cisco ThousandEyes to ensure a reliable and resilient network across multiple continents 24/7. From a centralized dashboard, administrators have a complete view of the cloud application and network experience. This complete visibility into cloud applications and network services extends to the individual devices that connect to them. With users around the world, IT can quickly determine if the network or an application is causing a problem. Real-time triage efforts can be scaled to teams to troubleshoot and optimize digital experiences wherever they occur.
Since this world-class upgrade, the company’s mean time to resolution (MTTR) has decreased significantly. Problems are resolved in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Flight Center is returning to travel post-pandemic with confidence in its resilient network’s ability to support great customer experiences that drive its continued growth and expansion.
A roadmap for your digital resilience
Whether you’re facing disruptions to your business, ongoing security challenges, or changes in customer and employee expectations (or potentially all three), you need a network platform that can help you deliver this resiliency across every part of your infrastructure. Securing just the wireless network or WAN simply will no longer be enough.
In each of the examples above, IT visionaries addressed the challenges of a global area network by addressing three needs:
- Full visibility: Obtain information about all aspects of your digital infrastructure, your own or not.
- Built-in Security: Ensure security is built into every network touchpoint, from your data to every connection.
- Simple, proactive and automated operations: Invest in flexibility and agility to take the right action at the right time with confidence.
Through the Cisco Networking Cloudwe can help you deliver foolproof end-to-end networking, security, and observability across any network architecture and keep your experiences running at their best.
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