The traditional enterprise perimeter is long gone. Applications and workloads are shifting to the cloud and SaaS, corporate networks are becoming software-defined, and employees are transitioning to remote working either permanently or part-time.
While the work-from-home trend was already underway when COVID-19 started making headlines, the pandemic certainly accelerated the shift to remote working faster than many IT teams (and service providers) could have predicted. This swift transition undoubtedly placed a strain on residential broadband infrastructure and corporate IT services at a very inopportune moment—and, critically, it created a massive blind spot for IT teams.
Addressing the Remote Worker Blind Spot
You see, most IT teams are used to supporting an environment in which a majority of the workforce is based on campus, in a relatively controlled IT environment. And when a user reports an issue, IT has the tools and know-how needed to find and fix it quickly. However, supporting remote employees at home requires a totally new toolset built for the unpredictable and decentralized nature of the Internet and a myriad of external dependencies that can impact service delivery.
To support a growing remote workforce and close this visibility gap, IT teams have turned to ThousandEyes End User Monitoring for complete end-to-end visibility into their users’ experience. ThousandEyes Endpoint Agents are deployed on user devices, such as corporate laptops or desktops, and provide visibility from the remote users to any business-critical application across any network, including home Wi-Fi, broadband ISPs, VPN underlays, Internet transit, and public cloud environments. Endpoint Agents also allow IT teams to measure connectivity to VPN gateways, API endpoints, and other services users need to access, such as collaboration apps.
Read the blog, Expanding VPN Visibility to Support a Secure Remote Workforce
Using TCP Testing for Endpoint Agent
Over the past year, IT teams have dealt with a deluge of remote workers. For them, the visibility that ThousandEyes End User Monitoring provides has been a lifeline that helps to monitor connectivity to critical SaaS applications, troubleshoot wireless issues, and ensure VPN gateways work as expected. Nevertheless, enterprise security policies can sometimes limit IT’s ability to probe end-to-end network paths and see the complete picture. That’s why we are offering TCP support for Endpoint Agents.
By using TCP to conduct performance probing, rather than relying on ICMP alone, enterprises can enjoy the full benefits of End User Monitoring while maintaining their existing security policies. In addition, by using TCP testing, you can probe along the true path that your packets will take to reach an application, allowing you to understand better the performance remote users can expect when interacting with that application or service during their workday.
Solutions for All Touch Points
As enterprises move toward a hybrid workforce model in the months and years to come, they will need solutions that enable end-to-end visibility into their employees’ experience, whether they are on campus, working from home, or working from anywhere else. And as enterprise networks continue adopting the secure access service edge (SASE) model with all its touch points—secure web gateways, VPN clients, proxies, applications, and the like—any lack of visibility can lead to increased MTTR and prolonged outages that impact users.
With ThousandEyes, enterprises can finally enjoy complete network visibility while maintaining network security and delivering the remote working experiences that keep employees productive.
