Ensuring a Positive Digital Experience for Users with a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Solution

CISO on CISO Perspectives

As the digital landscape continues to rapidly evolve, superior user experience is more important than ever before. But with a growing number of network edges and increased reliance on disjointed tools for LAN, WAN, cloud and security monitoring, consistent user experience and visibility is becoming more of a challenge for some networking and security teams. 

Fortinet CISOs Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Alain Sanchez, and Renee Tarun discuss the challenges CISOs are facing when it comes to ensuring positive user experience and how a Digital Experience Monitoring solution can help.

What is digital experience monitoring and why is it such an important focus for organizations today?

Jonathan - Contactless commerce and other manifestations of digital transformation, means user experience is more important than ever before. Across all industries, great customer experiences are now just as important as business outcomes. Digital experience monitoring solutions offer complete visibility of network performance and security posture, combined with automated remediation to ensure an application in any deployment—whether containers, cloud, on-premises, or hybrid—is meeting user expectations. By analyzing network and security performance and their impact on the digital experience, potential problem areas can be identified and remediated before they impact the business. 

For example, digital experience monitoring reflects the Fortinet Security Fabric’s ability to apply predictive and proactive steps for better outcomes and experiences.

Alain - From a business perspective, social distancing made it particularly important to acquire a superior quality of customer intelligence. This deep knowledge of the behavior allows in fact to streamline the number of options and questions that are presented to the user. I was discussing this topic during a memorable roundtable recently. In the applications, when users report a loss or a traumatizing accident, it is important to right-size the questions that are being asked. Advanced CISOs manage to factor in their context-sensitive applications the emotion of the person reporting a claim. To achieve this, they need a level of insight that collects network and security information from the edge to the application, securing everything in-between. Only a holistic platform that collects, detects, and analyzes both network and security parameters can to this. 

Renee - In today’s environment, organizations are accelerating their digital transformation initiatives. This transformation is driven by the user experience versus speeds and feeds. The availability, performance, security, and quality of an application and its components can all impact whether the end-user experience is positive or not. Digital experience monitoring enables IT teams to quickly identify, manage, and fix customer experience performance issues before they affect the business. 

What challenges are organizations facing when it comes to ensuring positive user experience?

Alain - The balance is fragile between asking too much, which decreases customer satisfaction or asking too little and missing a key element of the customer profile. At the same time, companies need to ensure security while maintaining high user experience. With non-integrated networking and security components, they need to sacrifice one to provide the other. But as they adopt a holistic approach, advanced security can still be achieved while preserving a high level of user intelligence. Therefore, a DEM solution is critical. CISOs then become genuine business enablers, offering a level of secured customer insight never achieved before.

Renee - Since most IT environments are increasingly complex and distributed, organizations need a high-performance, secure network to successfully achieve their digital business initiatives. However, many organizations are faced with legacy systems that cannot scale or support changing business environmentS. In addition, many of their point solutions for IT and security result in silos creating multiple panes of glass to monitor and manage. When it comes to system failures, time is money. Downtime from outages and degraded user experiences impacts revenue, brand, and even reputation. 

Digital experience monitoring can help provide the necessary insights to both network health metrics and application performance to identify potential problem areas that can affect user access. It also provides network visibility and agile remediation to achieve greater security and business efficiency. 

Visibility is key to any network security strategy. How can a DEM solution help CISOs gain better visibility and control over their networks?

Renee - The right DEM solution will deliver full-stack visibility into every service, network device, and application - in any deployment, whether in containers, cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. This functionality is critical as digital transformation makes networks more complex than ever before. When performance issues are detected, they must be fixed quickly. This means identifying root cause and determining if it is a network and/or security incident. A DEM solution can extend traditional performance monitoring features with incident response tools. It provides a single platform that can detect and respond to performance incidents quickly and efficiently. In addition to performance monitoring, it can provide flexible alerting, extensive incident management features, and automated response tools.

Jonathan - Today’s highly distributed networks that span LAN, WAN, data center and cloud edges requiring integrated visibility and control to ensure optimized performance across networking, security and compute. Even if all three elements are highly adaptive and scalable, optimized for business processes with tight tolerances, without integration, the practical reality is highly optimized bottlenecks on network edges. Digital experience monitoring provides the cross-platform visibility that allows teams to make predictive and proactive network, security and compute changes to ensure edge-to-edge performance. DEM provides the insight needed to ensure the network and security are adapting in concert as your cloud scales. When networking, security and computing are working together you get the high performance, low latency and incredible responsiveness that enables better business outcomes and enhanced experiences.

Find out how the Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization’s entire digital attack surface to deliver consistent security across all networks, endpoints, and clouds.