When you are outsourcing IT work, you must be cautious about overbilling from overseas organizations. While they may be doing a stand-up job for you, the purpose of doing any outsourcing is to save your company money.
Fortunately, if you’re using IP SLA, there are some neat tricks to make sure that your outsourcing partner is doing what you are expecting them to do, in the right amount of time.
When an outsourcer is using network resources and sending you data about how those resources are being used, you can actually find out if this information is true by using network performance monitoring (NPM) tools. What’s great about this is that since NPM is highly customizable, you can set up a dashboard that lets you monitor specific ports, network traffic and even IP addresses that can give you better information than even your outsourcer can give you.
Pairing NPM with IP SLA is the important element in doing this. With IP SLA, you can go in and analyze flow, breaking down this information in your NPM based on the performance elements listed above. You can use this data to make critical decisions on how to work with your outsourcers going forward, making these choices based on solid metrics.
You can also use an application performance monitor to view the performance of the server-based software architecture to make sure there is an optimal amount of work being done across the network. All you have to do is perform regular baselines and average day-to-day operations off those metrics.
It’s your network, and it’s your money being spent when you are being billed by your outsourcing partners. Make sure that your budget is being well spent by paying attention to network performance across remote locations to ensure that you are getting the most bang for your buck. If you’re already using NPM and APM all you need to do is configure these tools to properly monitor these links you have with outsourcers.
Source:http://www.articleadda.com/it-outsourcing-from-a-network-systems-standpoint/
