Written by Andé Kock and Rachelle Coetzee of PerfectWorx
South Africa is at the tail-end of a bumper holiday season spurred by the nation’s 12 million e-commerce users who are expected to almost double in five years*.
These growth-boosting figures are powered by a local e-commerce environment that’s taken its place amongst the world’s best because SA retailers, SMEs and others are less encumbered by legacies and more interested in efficiencies.
Foremost amongst the efficiency-enabling overseas e-commerce tools that local talent has cherry-picked for its ability to do the job well, is one that can radically cut down the time it takes for a support team to identify and resolve an issue.
Our experience has been that Cisco ThousandEyes can slash issue resolution for online merchants and others from an average of two hours to just thirty minutes.
In today’s digital age, connectivity uptime and seamless application performance are non-negotiable for business success. However, the internet often operates as a “black box”, leaving businesses without visibility into potential issues.
AI-based tools that have machine learning built into the solution can help businesses be proactive by spotting potential issues before they become problems. By leveraging historical data, recurring patterns can be identified and potential outages flagged. Essentially, these tools act as flashlights to illuminate the inner workings of the internet. The result is a unified, browser-based, single-dashboard view of what’s really going on.
Creating a seamless customer experience for your ecommerce solution means implementing a total network and internet visibility dashboard solution. If you haven’t already done this, January 2025 could be the time when your business starts reaping the benefits of being able to easily locate and resolve network problems during any point where the firm is transacting or exchanging data.
For South Africa’s ICT environment to continue to flourish this year, businesses must be provided with insights to monitor and visualise exactly how applications, services, hardware and internet providers are working across their network. In particular, end-to-end visibility of the network makes it easier to pinpoint whether an issue is ISP (internet service provider) or third party-related.
If we turn to the retailer space for the best way to explain the value and impact of network monitoring and internet visibility solutions, we need look no further than the recent holiday online shopping period.
Millions of local users rushed to e-commerce sites. Solutions like ThousandEyes can be critical in ensuring that e-commerce sites stay online even when overloaded with high volumes. These machine learning based-solutions mean IT support teams no longer get stuck on a site trying to troubleshoot and pinpoint a fault.
Additionally, with most of the world moving to the Cloud because of scalability requirements, it is critical to be able to implement a monitoring and visibility solution that enables scaling from monitoring two or three applications to whole global networks with thousands of endpoints. At the end of the day, businesses must receive the same level of predictive insights no matter how fast they are growing.
It’s critical, too, for any visibility solution implemented to support different kinds of network architectures like hybrid, multi-cloud or on-premises set-ups. This will enable businesses to grow and scale without compromising the visibility of their network.
In 2025, reap the reward of uninterrupted operations built on the back of effective web application monitoring and internet insights.