Everywhere we turn, there's something new being written about the craze for cloud-based solutions, many of which fall under the SaaS category. We live in a world in which nearly every kind of business activity can be packaged and marketed "as a service." The only requirement for a software service, for example, is that the vendor finds a buyer who's willing to pay the asking price. Modern buyers want to ensure that their purchases provide something that helps them meet their goals, which may be personal or business in nature.

The Background on SaaS

Finding a market for a service hasn't changed that much in the last few millennia. When you're trying to monitor computer systems from the other side of the world, you need reliable tools. We're no different than traders standing in the market square waiting for villagers to come along and buy the fattest chicken. We have just gotten fancier about how we communicate and how we keep track of our business operations. In fact, we are committed to providing the finest tools for cloud-based network monitoring. 

The Modern Game

Recently, we read an article on CIO.com that made us think. Stephen Lawson opened with these words: "Cloud computing is changing the game for one of the hardest problems in IT: running a network." He went on to share that a business can actually access tons of data about the "state of a network." It's easy to find metrics that portray how various IT systems are performing at any moment, but it's easy to waste time focusing on the wrong metrics. You want to take a strategic approach to monitoring business systems around the world. There are so many threats from inside and outside of the network and ways that each system can fail. 

Cloud-Based Monitoring

We market solutions that help medium and large companies monitor their systems throughout the globe. Lawson's article prompted this question: What do these companies stand to gain by using cloud-based network monitoring solutions like ours? If your company's offices are located in China but your headquarters are in Silicon Valley, it's not practical to fly to the site every time a server gets hacked. However, each day you need to know the status of networked systems. What is a reasonable investment to make? How many people do you need in charge of reviewing the data gained from monitoring solutions?

Choosing the Right Level of Monitoring

First and foremost, your company should decide the appropriate level of monitoring that will give your chief information officer sufficient information to make decisions. If you are operating IT systems in the cloud, you won't be making regular site visits to each data center or business location. Your team will use cloud-based tools to assess the present condition of every system, regardless of its importance to your company's entire infrastructure.

Prioritizing the Monitoring Data

The data that your company gets from monitoring solutions can help you to prioritize the work of all IT people responsible for system operations. Before you can pursue fixes to any problems that affect your IT networks, you should create a decision tree. This is a system that helps your tech people to review performance data generated by cloud-based monitoring solutions. A well-designed process will help them decide which problems to ignore and which problems to bring to the attention of the CIO. Your people won't be able to fix every problem or take systems offline before some threats do a lot of damage. The point is that you can use automated monitoring software to pinpoint problems. If employees have a decision tree, they can take appropriate responses often without having to bother the CIO.