Microsoft Office 365

Get performance insight and improve what you can control

Many organizations have embraced Office 365 for its ease of administration, predictable costs and other benefits. However, the transition from Microsoft applications that run on-premises to their SaaS counterparts can leave IT teams feeling less in control yet still accountable.

What can be done to adapt? We recommend taking these steps:

• Get deep insight into the experience of every Office 365 end user
• Set and manage against your own service objectives for applications, groups, and locations
• Acquire the means to proactively detect and quickly troubleshoot Office 365 performance issues
• Focus on improving what you can control: the performance of devices and networks

  Troubleshoot performance issues quickly

Proactively detect performance issues via automatic baselines for the normal performance of every application activity on any type of user device. Then quickly determine whether the issue is in the device, network, or SaaS backend.

If the device is suspect you can isolate the cause with three correlated streams of data: device health and performance, application performance as experienced by the user (from click to render), and user behavior. Locate the source of a network delay with integrated packet and flow data provided by Riverbed network performance monitoring (NPM). 

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  Manage against your own service objectives

Microsoft guarantees uptime for Office 365 applications, but IT is still responsible for the end-user experience. Application performance can vary greatly between users because it is affected by the location, network path, device, and other factors.

Riverbed gives you to ability to manage against your own service objectives for Office 365 performance by setting response-time thresholds for application activities. When performance deviates from the acceptable range for a specified share of users, our monitoring tool logs an incident and sends an alert. Then it speeds resolution by identifying the probable cause. 

  Evaluate the impact of changes

Did moving an application to the Cloud improve or worsen performance? For everyone or just for some people? What effects did the last software update have on user experience? Did a change to the network or a device have the positive effect you intended?

Find out by monitoring the click-to-render response times that end users see for key business activities before and after changes. Then determine whether a change had a positive effect on workforce productivity and customer service. You can also quantify the business impact of change by taking the value of end-user time into account with our cost analysis feature.

  Make the cloud feel closer

The user experience of Office 365 is highly dependent on the networks between client devices and the Microsoft cloud. Application performance can be improved with better network performance.

Use WAN optimization to speed application traffic through network bottlenecks and reduce the negative effects of latency due to long distances. Riverbed WAN optimization uniquely spans all the way from the end-user’s laptop into the Microsoft cloud. This is especially helpful to mobile workers for whom performance is degraded by “last mile” bottlenecks. 

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  Give priority to critical applications

Network performance is important for business-critical applications. However, not all traffic needs to move quickly. Workforce productivity will be affected more by delays to time-sensitive applications such as the Skype for Business suite than OneDrive backups.

Riverbed SD-WAN recognizes over 2,200 applications—whether encrypted or not. It also lets you define policies that give quality-of-service priority to voice, conferencing, and other business-critical applications. SD-WAN can also steer the traffic of real-time applications onto the best network links.