The Hybrid Workplace Requires a New Approach to SaaS Observability

Since we were first parachuted into distributed work in 2020, most companies have now adopted a sustained hybrid workplace. According to a recent Gallup survey,  there’s no reason to expect this to change anytime soon.

Meanwhile, the last couple of years have simultaneously seen an explosion in the use of SaaS. In fact, 2020 was the first year in which the cloud market became larger than the non-cloud market, and SaaS was the leading cause of this. Gartner has predicted an uptick of 11% in the enterprise software segment across 2022 – tied directly to organizations upgrading to SaaS. The overall market is expected to reach $397.5 Billion by the end of this year (and that’s a conservative estimate).  

For all business functions, from finance to sales, SaaS enables agile collaboration across distributed teams. For IT teams, the benefits are just as palpable: by outsourcing software development, installation, maintenance, and support, IT can now focus on outcomes as opposed to application delivery.  

Find out more about the good, the bad and the ugly of SaaS in the hybrid workplace by watching our recent webinar with guest speaker Liz Herbert, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester.

Assuring the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is paramount

To enable productivity for your employees working from anywhere, it is critical to ensure that SaaS applications suffer no downtime and are reachable 24x7. Application latency and outages are no longer tolerable: if a particular transaction is slow or if an application is down (as happened with Slack earlier this year), IT Service Desks and Lines-of-Business need to know what’s going on and why as quickly as possible.

When employees were centrally located, IT could look into corporate network and endpoint environments to identify where problems lay. This is no easy feat in today’s hybrid environment. With the growth of SaaS amidst these enormous changes in working conditions, IT blind spots have grown exponentially.  

Network, Application, and Monitoring teams: how many hours do you spend troubleshooting issues with a network and application infrastructure that is no longer in your control? 

Why traditional monitoring approaches fall short 

In my role at Catchpoint, I talk to many Network and Service Delivery teams whose job it is to make sure that employees can use their applications wherever they are, whenever they need to, and whatever they're working on. They repeatedly tell me that the adoption of SaaS has introduced a huge number of blind spots since the traditional IT environment is now outside of their control. Over the last ten to fifteen years, the technologies that were once owned by Enterprise IT have been outsourced to third-party suppliers who host them in external environments.

Traditional monitoring approaches such as Device Performance Monitoring (DPM), Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) all largely worked inside the physical corporate perimeter, particularly when applications were owned by IT. However, they fall woefully short in this new world because these technologies have had to evolve to make the necessary Digital Transformation happen:

• The device is being outsourced to service integrators and cloud vendors. 
• The cloud is becoming the new data center. 
• Application development, hosting, maintenance, and support are now provided by SaaS vendors. 
• And the internet is the new corporate network for all employees working from anywhere. 

For all the modern technologies that businesses rely on, primarily the internet, and cloud and SaaS services, there now exists a black box outside of IT’s control.  

Catchpoint opens the black box of the modern digital enterprise 

Catchpoint’s complete observability solution leaves no blind spot across endpoint connectivity, SASE/VPN clients, the internet and SaaS applications. We deliver insights not only into what is happening inside your SaaS applications, but into any third-party technology that helps deliver them - in terms of availability, reachability, performance, usage, and adoption.

Ready to learn more? 

Download our SaaS Observability Solution Brief to understand exactly why Catchpoint is uniquely positioned to help you deliver a high quality of service for all your SaaS applications.