A Breakthrough in Network Visibility: Introducing Masergy’s New SD-WAN Portal

When it comes to managing your global network, unified visibility is everything.

Recent IDG research found that IT leaders rank the level of visibility and control as one of the three most important factors when selecting SD-WAN solutions. The management portal is the SD-WAN customer’s window into network performance, and it plays an important role in communicating the current state of bandwidth resources, applications, and sites connected. It also demonstrates whether network providers are delivering on their service level agreements (SLAs).

Visibility challenges in a multi-cloud IT environment are commonplace. SD-WAN and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions make IT management easier. But these technologies and their management portals are rarely integrated, which creates a disjointed view of applications and the network:

• Network managers are often lacking application-by-application visibility and real-time performance data in a single portal.
• Hybrid networking strategies that combine both public and private connectivity types typically create fragmented views of traffic.
• Adding SD-WAN edge devices to an existing network can cause visibility issues when communication occurs either site-to-site or site-to-cloud; the traffic is “walled off” from much of an organization’s existing WAN infrastructure.

These scenarios create unnecessary obscurity and management complexity. Seeing and evaluating performance across private and public connectivity types, edge devices, cloud environments, applications, as well as voice and video traffic typically requires multiple monitoring dashboards. This puts the burden on the customer, leaving network managers struggling to reconcile information across disparate systems, components, and providers as they seek to understand the root cause of their jitter, latency, and bandwidth challenges.

A far better approach is to have one management portal for unified visibility across the entire network and application environment. The good news is, with Masergy, this better way just keeps getting—well, better!

Masergy’s New SD-WAN Portal: Aligned Network Visibility

Masergy’s Managed SD-WAN management portal just took another leap forward, driving new innovation in network visibility. This week Masergy announced the next evolution of its Intelligent Service Control Portal, rolling out new enhancements that give customers deeper transparency and a more simplified management experience. With a single pane of glass, customers get a unified view of analytics for network, UCaaS, WAN edge devices, and application performance.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Best-in-class visualization and global maps that make for faster evaluations and fewer clicks to simplify network management tasks.
• Customizable dashboards, enabling IT managers to drag and drop their most important performance metrics into a single view.
• Added cybersecurity visibility across cloud, premise, and hybrid environments—uniting network and security insights for heightened levels of intelligence.

Best of all, the Intelligent Service Control Portal is available online, anywhere, anytime. Even from your internet-connected beachside lounge chair, you can access real-time analytics and self-service controls. Better still, you can tap into the self-service controls when you need changes on the fly, and you still call on Masergy’s network experts to help with any service modifications. This co-managed model allows for the ultimate management flexibility.

More SD-WAN Visibility Features that IT Managers Love

• Graphs of peak usage trends as well as visuals of the top applications used.
• Global site maps showing the real-time status of all connections (both private and public) and allowing you to sort top destinations by country and devices.
• A UCaaS service dashboard puts inbound and outbound call quality scores at your fingertips (provided for customers who also subscribe to Masergy’s Cloud Communications services that are embedded into our global software-defined networking platform).
• Alarm notifications set up performance thresholds such as bandwidth utilization, packet loss, and QoS on a per WAN link basis–notifying you of service issues.
• When customers need help from Masergy, they can create and track trouble tickets for tech support and billing questions direct from the portal.

Dashboard Agility: How Masergy Accelerates Optimization

A set-it-and-forget-it strategy doesn’t apply when today’s enterprises are aggressively migrating to the cloud, introducing new public connectivity, growing their global footprint, collaborating more via video conferences, and investing in SD-WAN. Digital business requires continuous optimization of the network and a unified management portal that can quickly pinpoint where improvements should be made. As with Masergy’s new portal, these types of dashboards should help you:

• Get instant overviews of where IP traffic is coming from and where it’s going.
• View performance by region and by devices.
• Take control of your cloud apps, seeing exactly what’s being used (and what’s not).
• Allocate bandwidth according to your priorities, troubleshoot, and identify security threats.
• Do it all this in real-time and in a single dashboard.

As a 20-year pioneer in software-defined networking, Masergy has uniquely designed managed IT solutions for both visibility and high performance. Our single pane of glass for end-to-end visibility stands apart in the SD-WAN industry, but moreover, we combine this deep transparency with a long list of other unique differentiators:

• An embedded software-defined network that delivers 99+% global availability.
• Built-in security including next-generation firewalls with unified threat management and security monitoring and management services.
• Transport-agnostic options to mix and match public, private, and wireless connectivity.
• Direct cloud connections for secure connectivity to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and an ecosystem of SaaS applications—all backed by industry-unique cloud SLAs that guarantee performance.
• Unparalleled customer service that starts with a dedicated project manager and 24/7 network service monitoring and has resulted in consistent 70+ Net Promoter Scores for the past four years with 99% customer retention rates.