Three Tactics to Boost SaaS Performance (and One that Safeguards your Investment)

It’s a digital world—we just work and play in it...Unless, of course, you are a network engineer, application owner or part of the central monitoring team responsible for the performance of your mission-critical SaaS applications. Then you also have nightmares in it.

Here’s why.

The good and the bad of SaaS cloud services

Today’s complex digital enterprise infrastructures support a growing array of services and applications such as Software as a Service (SaaS), and all signs point to further acceleration. Indeed, Gartner expects spending on SaaS cloud services to grow 19.3 percent in 2022 to total $145.3 billion. That growth provides organizations with access to a host of options for making business more efficient, effective, and profitable.

At the same time, that growth puts IT behind the eight ball when it comes to delivering a flawless digital experience for both consumers and remote workers. As the complexity of the infrastructure delivery chain increases, it introduces visibility gaps and reduces IT’s ability to understand how infrastructure health affects the end user experience.

To compound the problem, IT is often stuck using yesterday’s monitoring tools. They essentially use a sword when they need a light saber, which often leaves blind spots that can lead to technical glitches. As companies accelerate their move to SaaS applications, they must also create proactive monitoring strategies that support a next-gen digital infrastructure.

So how do you build that strategy? The four tactics below are a good start.

1. Start with the end user

Many digital experience monitoring strategies grew from traditional performance monitoring frameworks. These frameworks focus on enterprise-based infrastructure, applications, and networks, suitable when employees worked inside the physical corporate perimeter.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work when the end user could be an employee working from home or another working from a local office. Instead, flip the focus to that of the end user’s perspective. Use an observability strategy that includes the broader view: last-mile and backbone service providers, CDN, DNS, security vendors, and cloud services.

2. Get away from siloed observability

IT needs big picture insights to find and fix performance issues across the entire corporate infrastructure. However, many teams use a hodgepodge of application, cloud, and network observability tools that create a fragmented view of how their infrastructure works. When the delivery chain moves to the cloud, this problem is compounded by SaaS providers using service-specific tools that IT can’t control.

Asking the fox to watch the hen house creates more observability gaps. Instead, look for a global system that can monitor every aspect of the delivery chain, including cloud-based services.

3. Don’t let today’s tool become tomorrow’s bottleneck

As companies embrace digital transformation, they are investing heavily in hybrid, multi-cloud, and online services to support their business and operations. As a result, enterprise digital infrastructures are constantly evolving. Any modern DEM strategy must be able to handle constant change.

Look for global services that can scale to fit your changing needs. Don’t commit to a static solution.

+ 4. Build a strategy that safeguards your investment in SaaS

SaaS is in hypergrowth mode. How can you protect your investment and ensure the highest quality of service for an IT environment you no longer control? A hybrid work environment holds unpredictable network challenges that can quickly undermine user experience and directly impact productivity. You need an observability strategy that allows you to observe digital employee experience of mission-critical SaaS applications beyond the firewall.

Committing to a new approach to SaaS performance management

Digital transformation projects have completely altered how enterprises approach infrastructure, as reflected by skyrocketing investments in SaaS and other cloud-based services. To succeed, these next-gen architectures demand a modern performance observability strategy that opens the black box of the modern digital enterprise and puts the end user first.