Best practices for businesses with multi-vendor network

Multi-vendor cooperation

If you look at infrastructure companies, you will realize that most of them focus on certain areas of enterprise infrastructures. This means that these companies understand that they have no option but to cooperate.

When running a multi-vendor network, you need to ensure that you are cooperating with other solution providers. This helps in eliminating the challenges that might render your network vulnerable to performance issues.

Partnerships with other technology experts are playing a significant role in improving implementation, interoperability, and performance. It also gets easy for businesses to troubleshoot issues, especially when facing a problem that affects different vendors.

Monitoring and control

A few years ago, businesses relied on siloed architectures to monitor and control their infrastructure components. This is something that you need to avoid at all costs if you are running multi-vendor networks.

Using a siloed architecture means that you have a monitoring and control platform for network vendors as well as operating systems, servers, and all the components in your infrastructure. With more vendors, this could get complicated and disjointed.

Instead, since virtualization makes it easy for businesses to manage different stacks of servers from multiple vendors, they (businesses) can use tools such as SolarWinds’ multi-vendor network monitoring tool to monitor and control their multi-vendor networks.

These tools expand and scale depending on the requirements of your business. Apart from the multi-vendor network monitoring, they also come with other features such as alerting capabilities in case of issues, scalability, troubleshooting capabilities, intelligent mapping, and insights into network performance, among others.

Use open platforms

Initially, most businesses relied heavily on proprietary and closed technology infrastructures. This made it difficult for them to implement multi-vendor networks or even cooperate with other technology solution providers.

Today, if your business is running a multi-vendor network, you need to give priority to open platforms. This eases things like management interfaces, logging mechanisms, and proprietary protocols.

Some of the best open platforms that you need to consider are open APIs (Applications Programming Interfaces). It is these digital transformations that are driving customer experience and allowing businesses to pull out data from different infrastructures. The data can then be analyzed and manipulated to help in decision-making.

Implement a governance structure

Businesses with a multi-vendor network should develop defined rules that they follow when making decisions. These rules are important when, for instance, determining how decisions are made when adding more vendors, how the project roadmap is designed, and release dates, among others.

The governance structure should also have a clearly defined process in case these rules need to be changed. All vendors should adapt to changing requirements, so understanding how to change things is important for each one of them.

You can create a governance document to share these rules with all vendors in your network system. This ensures that everyone knows exactly what is expected of them. All vendors should have the same decision-making powers.

Advancements in technology are going to see more businesses adopting a multi-vendor network. This might be driven by the needs of different businesses. However, it is important to note that interoperability and the growing importance of data and data sharing are leaving most businesses with no option but to adopt this network. However, they have to ensure that they follow the best practices discussed above for them to be successful.