For this healthcare agency, ensuring that health organizations and providers have “always on” access to networks and applications is vitally important to the quality of care. Critical services, such as lab results and digital imaging require service assurance. The IT team was under tremendous pressure to ensure its new electronic health record system and data centers offered flawless network connectivity with hundreds of patient care providers.

The challenge IT faced was a lack of comprehensive visibility across its geographically dispersed, mission-critical data centers and both physical and virtual infrastructures. Network Operations had very limited tools for monitoring network and application performance. IT triage and troubleshooting would take hours, if not days to complete. This meant IT was spending upwards of 50 percent of its time on service issues, and in some cases the problems went unresolved far longer than acceptable. Due to the vast amounts of healthcare data and the complex, multitiered applications that were in use, it proved extremely arduous to pinpoint the root cause of application slowness — potentially impacting patient care.