Cisco Cisco Unity Express for SRE Weißbuch
White Paper
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 1 of 1
Unified Visibility into Branch Office Performance
What You Will Learn
The nGenius Integrated Agent for Cisco
®
Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) integrates industry-leading probe
technology from NetScout Systems Inc into Cisco ISRs. The Cisco ISR hosts the self-contained nGenius Integrated
Agent software on a dedicated services module, which provides the necessary infrastructure to securely install, run,
and manage the nGenius Integrated Agent software without affecting the core routing capabilities.
The combined solution enables the IT organization to provide consistent and reliable service delivery to branch-office
users by maintaining always-on visibility into both WAN and branch-office LAN traffic. It also reduces the cost and
complexity of monitoring and troubleshooting branch-office performance to help minimize network degradations or
downtime and the detrimental effects it can have on employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue
generation.
The Challenges of Managing Branch-Office Performance
Today’s branch-office users require the same “anytime, anywhere” access to business applications and services,
and they expect the same consistent high-quality, reliable experience as their counterparts in corporate locations.
However, the increasing use of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, cloud computing, and software as a
service (SaaS), and the trend toward IT resource consolidation are complicating the process of delivering and
assuring network and application performance at the branch office.
At the same time that applications and services are being removed from the branch office and consolidated centrally,
the number and importance of branch offices is increasing. One reason for this phenomenon is that branch-office
employees by nature tend to be either customer-facing or operations-oriented and, therefore, they play a vital role in
revenue generation, customer service and support, and profit making. The remote locations, whether they are
branch offices, retail stores, clinics, bank branch offices, or classrooms, are an important customer touch point
where businesses have total control of the customer experience.
With the heightened status of branch offices within organizations, it is more important than ever to equip distributed
workers with ubiquitous and consistent access to information and services. Accomplishing this goal is not as easy as
it sounds. Historically, branch offices have often been afterthoughts or additions because of mergers and
acquisitions, and have frequently received less-sophisticated and lower-performance network technology and IT
services than headquarters or corporate offices. This situation makes it complex to add new services, particularly in
organizations without local IT staff, and it has left older branch offices plagued by poor quality of service (QoS) and
degraded application response times over the WAN link. However, today’s business conditions make it necessary to
elevate remote workers' network experience to be comparable to that of employees connected directly to the
corporate LAN.
Some of the challenges facing IT staff when managing branch-office environments include:
●
End-user complaints of poor response times for applications and services traversing the WAN.
●
Lack of visibility into applications and services that initiate in the branch office and do not pass through a
central monitoring point, such as SaaS or cloud services, Internet traffic, voice-over-IP (VoIP)
communications, or site-to-site traffic in MPLS networks.
●
Inability to troubleshoot bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive applications, such as VoIP, video over IP,
imaging applications, or other local branch-office applications.