Out with the old and in with the new? Yes and no. Although 2022 may have been an interesting year for the global website monitoring market, many of the trends that dominated this year will likely carry over into 2023.
Here’s a peek at how some of the top website monitoring trends of the year will likely impact security, network infrastructures and user experience going into 2023.
1. Observability and monitoring will play greater roles in cybersecurity
Observability is gaining momentum as a business model that can help organizations gain full visibility across their entire IT estates. The use of data in context works in tandem with monitoring to answer not only “what’s happening?” but also “why is it happening?”
Cyberattacks are ubiquitous and cost companies billions of dollars each year. They can be challenging to detect in complex distributed and microservices-based applications, and many go undetected until the financial and reputational damage is already done.
Therefore, observability and monitoring platforms play a crucial role in unifying development and production insights, helping companies to better understand the attack surface-area of applications. By employing metrics, logs, events, and traces, businesses gain a higher vantage point for observability, leading to better resilience to cyberattacks.
Observability helps your teams detect authentication vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities in access control and external dependencies as well as brute force attacks. Incorporating observability into your security strategy can offer the visibility necessary for guiding proactive security actions and making recommendations to your decision makers, not to mention the ability to deliver your intended services and products despite cyberattacks.
2. Greater focus on user monitoring and user experience
More than ever, users are turning to mobile apps and highly interactive web apps to access goods and services. This creates increasingly complex application environments. Google the phrase “user experience” and you’ll get over 4.2 billion results. It’s not surprising why user experience (UX) monitoring is gaining lots of attention in many industrial verticals, especially in ecommerce.
E-commerce app statistics:
- E-commerce app revenue reached $3.56 trillion in 2021, a 22% increase over the previous year.
- By the second quarter of 2022, there were over 3.5 million apps available on the Google Play Store, and approximately 2.2 million apps on the Apple App Store.
- About 10% of global e-commerce was conducted in the US, just behind China in total spend.
- 7.3% of total retail in the US came from mobile e-commerce in 2021. In the UK, that figure was 15.6%.
- Downloads and usage of e-commerce apps have grown over the past two years, with significant growth during the coronavirus pandemic.
Most users won’t wait for slow page-loads or applications that don’t work properly. IT teams need a way to measure the impact of overall network performance from the user’s perspective. User experience monitoring solutions, such as synthetic monitoring and web application monitoring, provide the tools needed to monitor crucial performance metrics about latency, throughput, packet loss, and more.
With the help of these performance metrics, organizations can identify and fix network issues quickly before they impact the overall end-user experience and affect revenue goals and overall brand reputation.
3. Drive toward greater reliance on automation
According to 451 Research, about 83% of IT decision-makers have plans to expand or improve the capabilities of their monitoring tools to achieve visibility into cloud-native environments. This includes the ability to collect granular data at scale, flexible data-querying functionality, advanced analytics and support for automation techniques.
The race to provide the right level of visibility via availability monitoring, configuration monitoring, performance monitoring, and cloud infrastructure monitoring may come down to what approaches IT teams take to network monitoring.
Incorporating more automation into their deployments may take some of the burden off network monitoring teams by helping to reduce user error, locate root causes of bottlenecks and errors, and reduce security risks — all win-wins for enterprise network teams and customers alike.
4. Device sprawl affects website monitoring
There will be an estimated 5.3 billion total Internet users (66 percent of global population) by 2023, up from 3.9 billion (51 percent of global population) in 2018. Even though many of these devices may not be connected to distributed enterprise networks, the numbers give a general sense that many companies are likely investing more tools to manage their network infrastructure.
The pandemic is partly to blame for the rapid growth of device sprawl globally and the shift to remote workforces. But the fact is that all these new connections have made it more difficult to recognize which devices are allowed on the network and whether or not they follow required protocols.
On top of managing and maintaining aging and outdated IT hardware and defending against increasingly sophisticated threat actors, IT teams are relying on monitoring technology to identify and manage the myriad of new devices employees are using for work, including those that are not on the LAN.
Smartphones, for example, are increasingly being used by employees for work, but when left unmanaged, these devices could be accessing and transmitting valuable business data without the IT departments’ knowledge – and without being monitored. Look for organizations to keep a keener eye on these types of devices. Network monitoring tools will become more essential to identify potential rogue devices interacting with networks in 2023.
5. Operational resilience takes center stage in monitoring business ops
In recent years, operational resilience has risen to the top of the regulatory agenda in many countries, notably in the health and finance sectors. It was brought into even sharper focus by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Regulators are acutely aware of the threat of disruption to financial firms, and by extension to their customers, particularly in times of stress. Technology-led business transformation, high-profile instances of outages, and recognition of the global interconnectedness of the financial system have led to increased focus on end-to-end business operations.
Underpinning the many regulatory initiatives is the common desire to create a financial services sector that is more resilient to disruption, reducing the potential for wider digital contagions, financial instability, harm to customers, and reputational damage to firms.
Firms should also consider the possibility of multiple concurrent disruptions and the emergence of new unknown threats and vulnerabilities. Keeping a keen eye on these types of disruptions remains critical, particularly with the accelerated adoption of technology and increasing sophistication of external bad actors.
Furthermore, increased reliance on third-party relationships raises concerns around the resilience of the third parties themselves, the concentration of critical service providers and data security. Similarly, central clearing has increased dependence on central counterparties (CCPs) and created a concentration of risk.
Although firms were always expected to manage their operational risk, plan for contingencies and have business continuity and disaster recovery plans, operational resilience is now much more complicated. A broader approach — incorporating equally important components such as people, processes, technology and information — is required. Customer impact is always in mind and governance and accountability are in the spotlight.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot when it comes to network monitoring trends for 2023? We tend to think not. If anything, with organizations favoring heightened awareness, the functionality and resilience of entire IT estate will be ever more important. Learn more about observability, website monitoring tools and security as we enter 2023.
