E-BOOK

ANYWHERE OPERATIONS

HOW PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZATIONS ARE SHEDDING TRADITION AND CREATING A BETTER PATH TO ANYWHERE OPERATIONS

1. INTRODUCTION

Anywhere operations has moved to the forefront of the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) agenda. Not to be confused with Work From Home, anywhere operations refers to an IT operating model that supports customers and enables employees anywhere. It also manages the deployment of business services across a distributed infrastructure.

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and thanks to the rise of mobile, cloud and social, the move to online business has cemented the value of flexible infrastructure and the inherent weaknesses of traditional, structured processes.

A much larger distributed workforce now needs access to data and applications, from anywhere to anywhere. Millennials expect to instantly connect with people, work platforms, and programs on the go, regardless of location.

Given that almost 75% of the workforce will be millennials in less than five years (INC), organizations need to take steps now to ensure their IT infrastructure is fit for a modern, work-from-anywhere workforce.

For many, this means moving applications and processes to the edge and cloud. But it’s important to consider the bigger picture of how to deliver a high user experience that’s fast, secure, and reliable. Anywhere operations inevitably causes new complexity across the IT landscape, which in turn creates a loss of visibility, and therefore control, across security and performance.

While it should allow for business to be delivered, accessed, and facilitated in remote environments, to get it right and close visibility, security and performance gaps, leaders will need a total rethink of their I&O strategy.

In the past, IT leaders have approached such transformational changes by opting for the traditional, tried, and tested method of adding more people, processes, and technology, believing it would accelerate progress.

Many organizations, however, are surprised to discover that simply adding more people, layering in more processes, and procuring more technology are the least helpful options. They only create extra complexity and slow operations down.

I&O leaders that seek both a flexible anywhere operations infrastructure and the critical visibility they need must:

Find the right balance of internal and external resources
Unite processes
Unify and modernize legacy architectures

Only then will they be able to make proactive, corrective, and impactful decisions about security and performance. This would ensure that organizations were more productive, more competitive and could deliver greater business outcomes.

In this ebook, we examine in more depth the challenges of anywhere operations, how traditional approaches to combatting these issues are unsuitable, and how progressive Infrastructure & Operations leaders, in control of security and performance, are carving out a new path to success.

2. THE CHALLENGES OF ANYWHERE OPERATIONS

The need for anywhere operations has created complexity

Today, Infrastructure & Operations teams must contend with highly distributed, complex environments with ever-changing demands. The last five years have witnessed the rapid rise of hybrid, multi-cloud environments and new application, network and security architectures.

In theory, this should enable organizations to quickly respond to ever-changing market requirements, however they must now seek ways to:

Obtain greater visibility insights
Improve performance
Deliver cybersecurity
Increase productivity & efficiency
Enhance user experience
Leverage competitive advantage

As Infrastructure & Operations leaders evolve their approach to adopt modern application and network environments, the challenge of managing visibility increases.

Anywhere operations – a picture of complexity

Hybrid, multi-cloud environments

Anywhere operations and competitive pressures are driving rapid cloud adoption, bringing with it a wealth of benefits, such as cost savings following a move to an increasingly OPEX-based spending model.

With the rise of mobile, cloud, and social, people continue to expect flexibility and the ability to connect with others regardless of their location or the services they’re accessing.

They expect this flexibility and connectivity to extend to their work-life too. They want to be able to easily access work platforms and programs on the move – with technology facilitating an ‘anywhere’ office.

For many companies, that means moving their applications and processes to the cloud or running hybrid transactions that span across on-premise and public cloud applications. However, when transitioning, the trade-offs are often visibility blind spots, degraded performance levels due to latency, unsatisfactory user experience, and heightened security risks.

Maintaining various disparate cloud environments increases business risk and outpaces the abilities of traditional security methods. This is due to distributed assets, new larger and more complex attack surfaces and the precision that cyber attackers use in vulnerable cloud environments.

To create competitive advantage, businesses need to exchange data fast and securely. Therefore visibility, security and performance must be at the heart of their cloud strategy.

The proliferation of devices and data

Anywhere operations will require a ubiquitous data strategy. Connected devices everywhere and anywhere will require companies to capture unprecedented amounts of data.

According to IDC’s ‘Global DataSphere Forecast’, the amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years.

The report also predicted that over 59 zettabytes of data would be created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide.

With the proliferation of data and devices, organizations often struggle to consolidate performance insights into one single view.

This in turn slows the diagnosis and resolution of user-impacting issues, elevates costs, degrades user satisfaction, and lowers workforce productivity.

This lack of visibility can have dire consequences. A slow-loading sales inquiry form on a website, for example, could significantly decrease the number of forms completed – impacting opportunities.

Without the ability to see what end-users see, IT service desk teams cannot take proactive action to fix problems. Time is wasted reactively spending hours gluing data together, affecting efficiency and productivity.

With data growth showing no sign of abating, coupled with the widespread use of IoT, AI, and machine learning, organizations need to consider how they can better manage and collate data in a more meaningful way.

The WAN edge

With the move to anywhere operations, the role of the WAN edge is becoming increasingly important, particularly with today’s distributed, work-from-anywhere workforce and the increase in IoT and other devices.

The edge brings data processing and storage closer to the devices where it’s being gathered, instead of sending it to a centralized location, such as a data center or cloud that could be thousands of miles away, to carry out those tasks.

Processing and storing data at the edge means the data should suffer fewer latency issues, and for many delivers faster application performance and better cost efficiencies.

At one time, the edge used to be a fixed place, typically the office. Previously, remote workers would connect to their nearest office, but would still be required to backhaul to the data center to access applications and would have security policies applied as they entered the data center.

Now, the edge can be anywhere, from the office to laptops, the home, mobile, or even barcode scanners – changing depending on where the user is and what they’re doing. In many cases, data is now accessed from and delivered back to the cloud where applications are hosted.

With the edge no longer a fixed location, users could be connecting to data across any network, and the data could be handled by different devices that might not be as secure as a centralized system. Heavy dependence on the cloud can also cause unexpected latency and security issues.

For these reasons, Infrastructure & Operations leaders must take the following steps for better visibility and control of edge performance and security:

Identify the edge and what this means for the organization.
Understand connections, and associated risks, of where users are connecting from.
Control wherever people can access from, implementing policy at the point of need.
Ensure that security is dynamic and continuous.

The ‘new normal’ of remote working

Although the move to anywhere operations was already well underway before 2020, COVID-19 and the move to a hybrid work-from-anywhere environment has been a catalyst for accelerated change.

Many companies initially viewed the increase in remote working as a soon-to-be-reversed crisis measure. However, teams thrived almost unexpectedly, and most organizations have adapted well and are embracing this ‘new normal’.

In 2020, numerous global organizations such as Twitter, Dropbox, and Shopify announced that they were abandoning their physical headquarters altogether, moving to a ‘remote-first’ operating model.

Frost and Sullivan’s ‘Post Pandemic Growth Opportunity Analysis’ also predicts that there’ll be 500% more remote workers post-COVID-19 than before the pandemic.

With home working going nowhere, there is an increasing need for IT to perform and for services to be just as available, reliable, and secure as they were in the office.

However, hugely popular collaboration applications, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, have put stress on bandwidth and devices. While slow running systems can affect remote workers’ productivity, it becomes challenging for many I&O teams to refute hard-to-spot issues, such as faulty cards or memory issues.

That said, many remote workers suffer in silence and do not call IT service desks to report minor issues. The daily downtime this causes is the ‘productivity gap’. With so many variables, suddenly, IT teams are faced with a visibility gap into users’ experience. This means they can’t proactively reduce issues before they arise or react immediately to any that do.

In our new, anywhere operations world, Infrastructure & Operations leaders need to be confident that they can deliver remote IT services in the long term.

Rising customer expectations

Customer expectations are rising, and businesses are under pressure to deliver innovation, connected journeys, extraordinary experiences, and personalized engagements across all touchpoints.

In recent years, successful organizations have mapped EX (Employee Experience), CX (Customer Experience), MX (Multiexperience) and UX (User Experience) journeys.

The culmination of these experiences has been described as Total Experience (TX). The goal of mapping TX is to improve overall experience.

Gartner’s ‘2021 Technology Trend’ report predicts that over the next 3 years, businesses that prioritize a Total Experience strategy will outperform their competition in critical satisfaction metrics.

However, customer and employee expectations often far exceed organizations’ internal capabilities.

To meet the high expectations required, businesses are now challenged to reconsider their approach to employee and customer engagement.

Or risk being left behind.

According to Salesforce’s third ‘State of the Connected Customer’ report, 73% of customers say that one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other businesses.

The report also indicates that 67% of customers believe the way a company uses technology indicates how it operates in general, and 75% of customers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences.

The widening ‘visibility gap’

Most IT teams acknowledge that they need to provide a better and more measurable digital experience. Yet, when it comes to monitoring user adoption and how applications and endpoint devices perform for employees, they find that their tools are only providing an approximate version of the truth.

IT teams simply have no understanding of where their bottlenecks are in the cloud, for example, or which remote users can’t access core applications, reducing their productivity.

Without security and performance insights in an anywhere operations world, IT becomes unreliable, and the consequences are devastating.

Many companies experience reduced productivity, poor end-user and customer experience, and security breaches. This leads to lost revenues, brand damage, and customer churn.

To justify the value of their IT investments, businesses need to see Total Experience and performance as being crucial. Without visibility, managing this wouldn’t be possible.

With improved visibility, businesses can consolidate data into a single view. This allows them to measure their systems’ effectiveness, improve user experience, enjoy quicker deployments, take proactive action, realize significant license cost savings, and ultimately drive competitive advantage.

Teneo customer example

In one organization, remote workers were finding that it was taking more than 10 minutes each time they tried to upload important documents to SharePoint.

Rather than wait, they saved them locally to their desktop so they could continue working.

The result was that colleagues were accessing out of date documents in the SharePoint environment, meaning they had to re-do the work, and the risk of losing those documents was higher due to the potential failure of the laptop devices they were saved on.

3. LIMITATIONS OF THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH

To transition quickly and resolve the challenges of anywhere operations, many IT teams are opting for what they know best. The traditional approach of:

Hiring more people with additional skills and expertise.
Adding more processes with extra layers to their operations.
Investing in the latest and greatest new technology to stay current without considering future architecture.

However, as it turns out, the traditional approach in a fast-moving digital environment is not the answer.

It only adds more complexity and slows teams down, compounding the issue. In the following pages, we explore the reasons why.

65% of CIOs believe skills shortages are preventing them from keeping up with the pace of change.

Harvey Nash & KPMG

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Talent shortages and over-stretched resources

With talent shortages in the job market, many existing resources are left over-stretched. Most IT teams are willing to acknowledge they need more people, resources, and skills, but hiring good talent is expensive, scarce, and time-consuming.

In a CIO survey by Harvey Nash and KPMG, 65% of CIOs said that skills shortages were preventing them from keeping up with the pace of change.

And, according to PwC, the most recent studies indicate that, in the US alone, 50% fewer candidates are available than are needed in the cyber field. Globally, some 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs are expected to go unfilled in 2021.

Talent shortages in the job market mean recruitment is expensive and takes longer than desired. That’s not to mention the time it takes to onboard, and train a new employee, or the risk a leaver poses to the business.

According to IDG Research, 46% of IT decision-makers said the skills gap was the number one reason preventing them from adopting SD-WAN.

Even with the best technologies, without the people and/or skills to utilize them, they become ineffective. It’s not uncommon for I&O teams to invest millions of dollars in market-leading tools that no one in the team knows how to properly utilize.

Those tools soon becomes ‘set and forget’ as they aren’t updated, or even worse become ‘shelfware’. Some teams don’t even make it to technology deployment.

Given the complexity of anywhere operations, Infrastructure & Operations leaders must learn how to select the most suitable external partners to complement their internal teams. Using external specialist teams for example, could help to eliminate barriers such as design, deployment or response. By finding the right balance of internal and external resources, I&O leaders can better navigate the challenges that anywhere operations brings.

Teneo customer example

One multinational manufacturer told us that they missed out on a potential $4.3M in connectivity cost savings over a 9-month period because they lacked SD-WAN deployment skills and had other project priorities to attend, which caused a significant project delay.

Another engineering firm told us it took them 8 months to deploy a next-generation firewall due to a security skills shortage.

Siloed and unscalable processes

Many IT leaders admit to having siloed design and unscalable operational processes across their domains. Often this comes down to different priorities, responsibilities, architectures and visions across functions.

When data is siloed into isolated information sources, departments can’t share critical information across departments, which results in lengthened Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). This also means it takes longer to make changes to correct issues that could lead to disruption.

According to a Harris Poll report, commissioned by Microsoft, 60% of employees feel less connected to colleagues when working remotely. The distributed, disconnected teams of the anywhere operations era are likely to further exasperate issues relating to the siloed mentality.

Smooth operations require accurate and regular communication between employees. Without a joined-up approach, lengthened MTTD and MTTR could cost businesses millions of dollars as performance is impacted due to unresolved issues and cyberattacks.

Alignment and co-operation across distributed teams can take months as they plan differently, use different solutions to address the same problem, and have multiple sources of truth.

This also impacts an organization’s ability to scale up or down quickly and leverage intelligent workflows that make the most of both human and technological capabilities, such as human-machine collaboration.

For many organizations, the answer is to implement new processes, and bring in more people, and additional technology to resolve the issue. They often don’t consider that this actually serves as a reinforcement to a siloed approach rather than a solution. To succeed with anywhere operations, I&O teams must find ways to unite processes and architectures, rather than divide them.

Teneo customer example

One security team that we worked with experienced frustration as their application team had adopted the cloud but only told them after the migration, leaving a gaping hole in their cloud security architecture.

Similarly, an insurance company struggled for over 9 months to align internal stakeholders around a network re-architecture plan.

Legacy architectures and tool proliferation

According to Palo Alto Networks, for cybersecurity, small organizations are using on average of between 15 and 20 tools, medium-sized businesses are using 50 to 60 tools, and large organizations or enterprises use over 130 tools on average.

As organizations transition to anywhere operations, tool proliferation continues to grow. Yet many of these tools are being brought into legacy architectures. And while they were once the best options for dealing with certain point challenges, many architectures now need to be overhauled and unified to solve the challenges of an anywhere operations environment.

Although businesses have access to so many tools, there are still solution gaps, and as little as just 10% of features are actually used. This is creating cost, operational, and technical inefficiencies. So it makes no sense to keep adding more to the mix until a new blueprint can be drawn out that is fit for the future.

Teams often believe that utilizing new tools will be simple and give them the collaboration and intelligence they need.

But once they’ve made the purchase, it’s a different story – because feature complexity, capability gaps, and user limitations soon render them useless. This is where data correlation and human-machine collaboration is essential. Where humans, the real experts, need to look at joined-up analytics to ensure nothing is missed.

And then there’s the exorbitant cost of keeping these tools running. According to Gartner, CIOs decreased the amount they invested in infrastructure and systems by 7.3% in 2020, and there’s a continued drive to do more with less.

Many suppliers are also inflexible in their contracts. For example, larger, more traditional service providers will often ask a company to pay for a full solution for 3 years, when they may only need to turn on 10% of the features for 6 months. They present an all or nothing approach with no OPEX options, lengthy contract durations, and/or more features than are needed. Neither of these things serves an agile business making the move to anywhere operations.

It’s clear that the opportunity for cost savings through consolidation across technology portfolios and architectures is significant, yet many are missing out as they continue adding technology in the traditional way. If they wait to modernize and unify their legacy architectures, it may be too late.

Teneo customer example

A global energy company had over 40 monitoring tools for NPM (Network Performance Monitoring) and APM (Application Performance Management).

The portfolio generated uncontrollable cost and operational inefficiencies. But they were still looking for the next solution to cater to a solution gap they had.

4. CREATING A HOLISTIC VIEW

Today, most Infrastructure & Operations leaders seek to make better use of resources to impact strategic business outcomes.

Unfortunately, in an anywhere operations world, most teams don’t have the resources needed to create a holistic approach that covers visibility, security and performance, from end user to edge to cloud.

But they simply can’t afford the consequences of reduced productivity, inefficiency, poor end-user and customer experience, or security breaches either.

While adding more people, processes and technology may at first sound like the fastest way to assist with the move to anywhere operations, the reality is that it moves teams much further away from their goals in today’s environment.

Forward-looking Infrastructure & Operations leaders are taking a different approach.

They’re starting with centralized, cross-siloed visibility of users and applications, before they think about improving security or performance. It’s what they’ve set as their core foundation before any re-architecture. And they’ve used the opportunity to fix their existing toolsets and re-balance their management resources.

With improved visibility, they can choose the right security and performance solutions and save time, effort, and money in the process.

Teneo customer example

One organization completely lost control when it suffered from crashes to its McAfee Endpoint Security module during the rollout of new software.

Their users quickly formed a bad opinion of the new software, but the team had no understanding of the scope of their problem.

Because they were stretched across the team and lacked the appropriate visibility to see what was happening, they had to involve a wide pool of end-users to get to the bottom of the problem.

Embarrassingly, those users included the executive team and the security team. The resolution took weeks, and by that point, users had formed a mistrust of the new software, which hindered adoption.

5. A BETTER WAY FORWARD WITH TENEO

The way we work has fundamentally changed: the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in the new normal of remote working, accelerating the move to an anywhere operations model. For organizations, it’s no longer a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ to make the transition, but rather, which services should transition first and how fast.

Customers expect organizations they work with to use innovative technologies, and connected systems and data. That includes AI and connected devices.

For I&O leaders making the transition, there are, of course, numerous complexities to overcome. This will involve a complete rethink of their I&O strategy, shifting computing from their data centers to the edge and cloud for greater flexibility and freedom.

When making the transition, however, I&O leaders often struggle with uniting legacy IT architectures and processes. It can also be a challenge to find the right balance between internal and external delivery resources.

But the transition process does not need to be painful. Successful I&O leaders are approaching the move to anywhere operations differently, seeking the right outside help to make the transition with ease.

They’re turning to a fast and flexible model of on-demand services to give them the scalability they need to provide continuous IT operations that support a distributed, work-from-anywhere workforce. And they’re using those services to gain the visibility of user experience, security levels, and performance acceleration they need for the transition to be a success.

Such a model can quickly pay for itself by allowing a distributed, work-from-anywhere workforce to get their jobs done more efficiently, collaborate with co-workers, and provide customers with the support and attention they need when it matters most.

Only Teneo can provide such a service. As a Managed Service Provider, we support Infrastructure & Operations teams with services that help them to rethink their visibility, security, and performance strategy. We give them the building blocks, expertise, and confidence to make operating from anywhere a reality.

We support Infrastructure & Operations leaders every step of the way. Through strategy, design, transition, and operation, we help teams make the shift to anywhere operations by delivering the ideas, and visibility, security, and performance insights they need for success.

With Teneo, you can:

Leverage our people, processes, and technology instantly
Keep pace with change
Remove complexity
Build an I&O strategy that drives digital innovation

Our services enable Infrastructure & Operations leaders to enjoy the benefits of an anywhere operations infrastructure while having the critical visibility they need to manage security and performance proactively.

This ensures organizations are more productive, competitive and can deliver greater business outcomes.

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At Teneo, we help to bring insightful information to the surface, so you don’t need to be a subject matter expert.

Working with us, there’s no overburdened technical overhead, and we can help you achieve your desired business outcomes, including:

Better insights and analysis
Less IT complexity
Optimized existing technology
Futureproofed infrastructure
Improved user experience & productivity
An IT strategy that drives innovation

Infrastructure & Operations leaders can also expect to see a significant improvement on value metrics, including:

Improved expenditure and ROI
Reduced headcount
Faster deployment / roll out time
Better tool utilization rates
Improved network uptime / downtime
Greater bandwidth and reduced latency
Improved MTTR
Reduced MTTD
Reduced dwell time
Reduced false positives

Our Flexible Service Levels

Our flexible services span the workforce, the edge and the cloud, so you get to choose the help you need, where it matters most.

Enhanced Support is our own support service and covers system or software updates, health checks, solution advice, and monthly reviews.

Managed Service Essentials covers license management, system health and alerts, and some limited config and change.

Managed Service Premier provides full solution performance management, monitoring and advice, config management and changes, and full reporting.

And Managed Service Plus is either our Managed Service Essentials level OR our Managed Service Premier level PLUS extra consulting hours from our subject matter experts.

When you work with Teneo, you’re in a safe pair of hands. They know how to deliver. I would definitely recommend them.

Bradley Tullett

Head of IT - Infrastructure & Operations, Mott McDonald

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Work From Anywhere

Our services can also be applied as solution packages. With our Work From Anywhere-Endpoint solution, for example, you can proactively reduce IT issues for your work-from-anywhere workforce, and react quickly when they arise, maximizing productivity when it matters most.

The solution delivers a fast and flexible model of on-demand services to give you the scalability you need to provide continuous IT services for workers, regardless of location.

With the solution, you can gain visibility of end user experience, get the user and endpoint security you need, and achieve SaaS performance acceleration to ensure your work-from-anywhere workforce is productive, without impacting your IT team’s workload.

Work From Anywhere-Endpoint combines ‘WFA-Visible’, ‘WFA-Zero Trust’, ‘WFA-Secured’, and ‘WFA-Optimized’ service modules to enable your work-from-anywhere workforce to be just as productive at home, at a remote location, or at the office.

Find out more about this solution package.

Our upgraded security is in a different class to the competition, bringing both insight and the power to act on it. It’s functionality we could only dream of before.

Max Caines, Network Design Consultant

University of Wolverhampton

Case study: SD-WAN Implementation for a leading defense contractor

Highlights:

Limited resources available internally to carry out SD-WAN deployment
Required support through strategy, design and infrastructure deployment
Shadowed Teneo through first 30 sites to learn from deployment experts

Challenge

They had limited resources available on their side to carry out an SD-WAN deployment. They were short-staffed, had other large initiatives that were a higher priority, and were going through a merger, so couldn’t execute on the project themselves.

Services:

They wanted to keep things internal – so we assisted with our SD-WAN Implementation service. They worked with us through the strategy, design and architecture phases of the project, and we provided hand-holding through deployment of the first 30 sites so they could shadow and learn from our experts.

Read how our SD-WAN Implementation service could help you.

Teneo has taken away what would have been a huge burden for us by providing managed services for our offices across the world.

Head of Global IT Services

Plan International

Case study: Visibility Tools Suitability Assessment for a global manufacturer

Highlights:

Global manufacturer faced an expensive NPM technology refresh
Limited staff required extra training
Teneo assessed the existing NPM tools for feature overlap against capabilities required
Moved the focus from 12 tools to 3 and recommended how to extract greater value

Challenge

With a large technology refresh approaching, the team were questioning their NPM investment. They were suffering from limited staffing resources, with only a few engineers dedicated to its operation. More training and knowledge transfer were needed, so they were unsure if they should persist and teach the team how to use the existing tools, or consolidate and centralize them.

Services:

Teneo delivered a Visibility Tools Suitability Assessment to help the firm analyze their existing Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) tools for feature overlap against their required capabilities.

Moving the focus from 12 tools to just 3, we were then able to recommend how the team could get the most value across their global, anywhere operations environment by targeting investment and increasing underutilized capabilities from their existing monitoring tools.

This allowed them to drive efficiencies through a significantly reduced NPM tool portfolio.

Learn more about our Visibility Tools Suitability Assessment.

5. A BETTER WAY FORWARD WITH TENEO

Why choose us?

Deep expertise.

We provide knowledge and expertise where it matters – technically and in delivering business outcomes by giving you the visibility, security and performance you need.

Easy to work with.

We remove complexity, help get the job done, and provide flexible service models.

Honesty and integrity.

We believe in doing the right thing for our customers, even if it means making decisions that impact our profit margins.

Global experience.

We’ve helped some of the world’s largest companies see new possibilities since 2000.

Best of breed approach.

We work with the best technology that we know well and manage every day.

Rich pool of talent.

Companies are investing in outcomes, not skills. We possess the rare skills you need in a market with growing demand.

Accelerated business outcomes.

Working with us propels businesses forward to achieve the outcomes they seek to remain competitive in this fast-moving, digital, anywhere operations world.

6. SCHEDULE A MEETING

Meet with us

Email us at info@teneo.net

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USA +1 703 212 3220
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