In the previous posts in our series on business continuity and Citrix ADC series, we discussed the following five objectives for business continuity and the importance of considering them all to ensure business success:
- Ensure workforce productivity, application availability, and end-user experience
- Scale IT infrastructure during unforeseen demand
- Respond faster to restore application performance
- Maintain visibility and control
- Remain secure and compliant always
So far, we’ve examined the first three objectives — maintaining application availability, scaling IT infrastructure and why rapid response is crucial in business continuity. In this post, we will look at the importance of maintaining visibility and control during unforeseen events and how Citrix ADC and Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) can help.
You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See
Maintaining control when the unexpected happens is one of the fundamental tenets of crisis management. From hostage negotiations to health pandemics, the element of control is vital to introduce a level of comfort and prevent the unanticipated getting out of control. The same is true for business continuity. Exercising control during an unforeseen event brings stability and speeds recovery.
During most business continuity scenarios, it is likely that the organization will need to make changes; but uninformed changes might make a bad situation worse. That’s why you need visibility and analytics. After all, you can’t fix it if you can’t see it. Knowing what’s wrong in real time means you can start to fix it faster.
The problem, however, is that visibility tools are often fragmented, and it’s difficult to get the right information in the hands of the right people in your organization. Moreover, there are frequently too much data and not enough clear, actionable information to enable informed decision making.
Use Citrix ADM to See What’s Wrong
The Citrix ADC and Citrix ADM solution delivers the right level of information in an easily consumable form so you can see issues before they become problems and act accordingly. Citrix ADM provides industry-leading telemetry and analytics about the condition of your applications, the app delivery infrastructure, and the network. This gives you the visibility you need to stay in control of changing situations and keep your business going.
Here is some of the functionality Citrix ADM offers:
A Single Place to Look
Citrix ADM provides a single pane of glass to manage your application delivery infrastructure. Clear dashboards offer actionable insight into the health and performance of your entire app delivery fleet, across all your applications, wherever they are deployed. This enables you to identify issues across your multi-cloud infrastructure during unforeseen events and troubleshoot them much faster.
All the Information You Need
Citrix ADM collates telemetry about all aspects of your app delivery — the ADCs, the network, the applications, and even the user experience. The data is processed and presented in intuitive dashboards that immediately highlight issues around the performance, health, and security of your applications and licenses.
- App Insight: Shows your applications and their usage. Simple composite health scores and color coding make it apparent when issues need your attention.
- Infrastructure Insight: Offers feedback on the conditions of your ADC fleet. You can see quickly which are performing and which have issues or are struggling with performance.
- Security Insight: Highlights the attacks on your systems in real time and maps out trends with time. It also highlights which applications are face the greatest threat so you can prioritize your remediations.
- User Experience: You can even track how your users perceive your applications. This enables you to get ahead of issues and make changes — to the delivery infrastructure or the applications themselves.
Additionally, ADM insights are interactive, so you can drill into specific applications and issues to troubleshoot them, all from the same single pane of glass.
Having all this information at your fingertips makes it easy to spot when disruptions occur and fix them, putting you in complete control.
Role-based and Customized Dashboards
With Citrix ADM you have the flexibility to configure data visibility to suit your organizational structure. You can define what teams or individuals can see. Access is completely customizable and can be fitted to different roles.
For example, you can separate the tasks of the security and networking teams. You can assign visibility of different applications to different groups. You can even define access to be read-only for some and read-write for others.
While completely customizable to suit your organization, typical dashboards include:
- IT operations, which delivers a view of everything
- Security operations, which provides security-focused information
- Application owners, which shows app information specific to each application owner
With role-based dashboards you can put the right information in front of the right people at the right time. Keeping the information relevant helps aid decision making during a disruption.
Augmented Decision Making with AI and ML
To help that decision-making, Citrix ADM uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to augment data analysis. Citrix ADM will automatically learn the normal levels of performance for your individual applications based on historic trends and then alert you when deviations occur.
For example, Citrix ADM will analyze response times for all of your applications servers. It can then alert you when an individual server slows down during an unforeseen event. Because Citrix ADM learns what’s “normal” automatically, you don’t have to manually set acceptable thresholds, which minimises the chance of human error.
Because Citrix ADM uses AI and ML to identify anomalies, you can spot issues earlier and can start troubleshooting, find the root causes, and begin remediation sooner.
All these things together bring you the visibility and control you require to get your business back up and running at full capacity more quickly.
Maintaining control during an unforeseen event is essential to business continuity. You can’t exercise control over a situation without access to all the information. Citrix ADC and Citrix ADM combine to collate, analyze, and present the telemetry about applications, infrastructure, and networks across your entire multi-cloud environment so that when the unexpected happens you can make informed decisions about what to do next.
In the fifth and final installment of this series on business continuity and Citrix ADC, we will turn our focus to security and look at how it becomes even more important to remain vigilant as you try to keep the business going in challenging circumstances.
