Experts agree that any organization will suffer large penalties when it allows its Internet or intranet applications to experience downtime. With Web-based business applications, perception is reality; and your customers and employees perceptions of your business are based on the effectiveness of your Web applications. By maximizing the quality of that Web experience, you are able to directly affect your customers perception of your company's goods or services and their desire to acquire them.

Most e-business experts will agree that any organization will suffer large penalties when it allows its Internet or intranet applications to experience downtime. In addition to stock price and market value, other areas affected might include your Web presence, customer satisfaction and retention, lost orders, brand value, lost business opportunities, and increased operating costs. This serves as a stark reminder of the challenges you face on the path to a successful e-business experience. With Web-based business applications, perception is reality; and your customers' and employees' perceptions of your business are based on the effectiveness of your Web applications. By maximizing the quality of that Web experience, you are able to directly affect your customers' perception of your company's goods or services and their desire to acquire them. Internally, employees are more apt to utilize cost-saving, self-service applications if their experience is a good one.

The key to a strong Web presence is Internet Management. Internet Management implies a series of information management functions designed to maintain, monitor, and manage the information infrastructure, providing an organization with an effective and efficient Web presence. Internet Management is becoming more important to the successful operation of the business as IT no longer operates in a silo. In today's highly competitive world, management is taking a critical eye to IT to determine how IT, and in this case, Internet Management specifically, effects the bottom line business. Companies are moving beyond simply knowing if a Web application or Web site is available and towards proactive service management to determine if their service levels are being met.

The scope of Internet Management services is not limited to the hardware and/or software components that enable a site's functionality, but also takes into consideration the degree of usability that customers, business partners, or employees experience when accessing a site. Within Internet Management, three areas of extreme importance are availability management, performance management and performance optimization.

Availability Management

Firewalls, Web servers, and other networking servers compose critical infrastructure without which your Web-based application initiatives would fail. Internet server availability is more than just understanding if a server is operating it is understanding that each URL that server is serving has the appropriate content, which implies that the application server and database are all available, connected, and that each server is serving that content in a timely fashion. Internet availability implies more than just Web server availability without DNS service, many services to internal customers are lost, and Web services to external customers can be interrupted.

And, while firewalls are crucial to monitor from a security perspective, losing a firewall due to performance issues can have a high impact on the service levels that internal and external customers receive when interacting with the enterprise.

To ensure the availability and rapid response time of all your major Internet servers, it is important to monitor the site as its normal users would, which gives a company the ability to detect otherwise unapparent errors in site service, rather than monitor services and/or processes only. The focus on management needs to be broader than Web server management. Products with the ability to verify content can help administrators detect errors all the way to back-end databases, ensuring that errors are detected before they affect actual users. The Internet presence of the entire enterprise can be monitored by solutions with support for every conceivable platform. A central aggregation component in a solution can even provide high-level business views of performance data, making the product useful for business managers who don't understand what services are affected when server xyz goes down.

Availability management should also provide:

• Availability of enterprise-wide firewall infrastructure to ensure continuous access to your e-business and internal access to the Internet
• Non-invasive remote installation to keep your firewalls secure
• Quick notification of failures, including authentication failures
• Automation capabilities for quick, proactive security management
• Secure monitoring and management capability
• Firewall monitoring integrated with your enterprise management system
• Proactive notification of suspected Denial of Service attacks

Performance Management

Monitoring Internet services from a technology standpoint alone can provide troubleshooting information, but does not ensure the quality of business transactions. How does one test that, especially from a user perspective? All too often, response time is measured from an internal administration perspective within the enterprise, and not from what an outside customer or partner might be experiencing when accessing the Web site. For example, even though your MIS group can see that a server is up and running, if the end-user is experiencing poor performance they will suffer a productivity loss (internal user) or go to another site (customer). Companies should be able to determine the availability and measure the performance of business applications by executing real business transactions as a user would by monitoring response times from desktop environments.

However, response times alone are not enough if a transaction executes quickly, but generates the wrong content, it is a failure. So in addition to response time measurement, companies should also be concerned with content verification to ensure that not only is a page returned quickly, but it has the correct content. This type of synthetic, or active monitoring, can give the enterprise the ability to establish performance baselines and become aware of problems long before service levels are violated.

Many companies are considering implementing passive monitoring systems, as well, because while a web site is designed a certain way, users always tend to navigate through the site much differently than the designers had anticipated. To this end, passive monitoring systems are important in their ability to track actual user behavior, so administrators can be alerted when actual users experience errors, and specific users can be targeted to ensure that valued accounts are receiving optimal performance levels.

The ability to test business transactions for response time and content is also a key element to performance management. Key transactions can be recorded and saved, then scheduled for periodic execution. Upon execution, performance management solutions automatically report application availability and response times and identify locations and transactions with response time degradation to assist in alerting and determining the cause of the problem. These processes also enable Web site administrators to monitor actual end-user response times, and have that data displayed with internal response times. To manage performance most effectively, a solution should measure actual end-user performance from the client's desktop, with support of the latest platforms, such as Java. Ideally, these measurements can be taken without modifying client desktops.

Performance Optimization

A common concern among IT managers in today's economy is trying to stretch budgets and staff to accommodate increasing workloads. Rather than performing time intensive and expensive hardware upgrades, companies should consider technology to optimize the performance of their systems. By deploying technology that will optimize bandwidth utilization, IT managers can improve the customer experience without expending the time and resources on expensive hardware upgrades.

Performance can be optimized by reducing page download time, using intelligent, customizable compression software that compresses text data (HTML, Java Scripts, XML, etc.) as well as files commonly found in email attachments such as MS Word, MS PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat files. Compression technology will allow you to customize performance by managing Web Server CPU utilization, targeting optimization to specific URL's or IP addresses --or even based on the connection speed of the end-user. This reduces network traffic and improves response times all while managing existing resources. Using a product that resides on the Web server eliminates the need to configure or implement new software on client systems.

To summarize, effective Internet Management can:

• Ensure consistent and continuous end-to-end management of the e-business environment
• Ensure 24x365 availability of the e-business environment
• Provide real-time analysis of end-user response time
• Analyze Web-site traffic without performance degradation on Web and Internet servers
• Analyze Web transactions to determine the level of service being delivered
• Enable the automation of corrective action to solve common problems (e.g., to restart downed Web servers)
• Provide Web-based reports for historical trends, Web site availability, average response time and customized information
• Aggregate information for the Web site, individual Web servers and virtual Web server levels
• Provide intelligent compression for Web servers, which can drastically reduce page load time for end-users