Companies of today are running their business in the cloud, resulting in greater efficiency, innovation, collaboration, and differentiation.

As our dependency on cloud services continues to grow -- along with the amount of data stored within cloud services -- it is becoming increasingly vital that we ask ourselves the following questions:

• How do we best support our end users’ cloud application activity?

• Are my users compliant with our security policies?

• How can I measure the success of our investments?

• How do we have an intelligent conversation with our developers around the performance of our applications?

Enter event monitoring, an add-on service that provides the data necessary to answer these tough questions, by offering greater visibility into the adoption, security, and health of your cloud applications. Not only can you better protect your company’s data, but can also make more informed decisions to ensure you are getting the most out of the investment you’ve made in the cloud.  

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest use cases for event monitoring:

IT Ops and Support

As IT professionals, one of our goals is to provide world-class support for our end users. As we roll out new applications, we want those apps to always be available and to perform well. If problems should arise, we want to be able to troubleshoot and address those issues right away to minimize any impact on the business. None of this is possible without access to data around the health of the application.  

• Are any of my reports timing out?

• Which triggers are taking the longest to execute?

• Are all my integrations working?

• Which APIs are being used and by whom?

With event monitoring, system health information for every transaction is captured and made available to you to help troubleshoot issues, understand trends, and pinpoint areas that may need your attention even before they lead to support issues. Event monitoring is a key enabler for providing data-driven, world-class support.

Security and Compliance

Forty-three percent of companies experienced a data breach in the past year, up 10 percent from the same time period the year before, while the average cost of dealing with a data breach rose by 30 percent, to $4.8 million.

While Salesforce and other leading cloud providers are investing enormous amounts to protect our platforms and data centers, it is important to understand that an organization’s weakest link is typically its end users. In fact, the most common cause of data breaches in the last 12 months is inadvertent misuse by insiders.

Event monitoring helps to improve the security of your data by identifying user actions that may compromise security. It also provides the forensic data you need to understand login and data access patterns, and whether or not there are any anomalies that need to be investigated.

• Who is logging into the service and from where?

• What types of documents are being shared?

• Who is viewing and downloading those documents?

• Who is exporting data, from where, and how much?

Process Optimization

One important benefit of cloud computing has been to fundamentally change how IT partners with the business. No longer viewed simply as a cost-center weighed down with an ever increasing focus on maintaining existing systems, IT has emerged as nimble partner who can move quickly to help business innovate and succeed.

To justify this shift in influence and investment, we must be able to clearly demonstrate positive effect on the business, whether it is through increased revenue, efficiency, cost cutting, KPIs, or user adoption.

Understanding whether employees are using the applications we’ve developed is an important step in building an ROI model and understanding IT’s impact on higher-level business metrics. Of course, it’s not only if people have adopted the system, but how they are using it, that will lead to insights to further optimize your processes and portfolio.

• Are my users using the new mobile app we’ve recently deployed?

• If so, what are the most popular tasks being accomplished in the mobile app?

• Which parts of my application are least used and might require re-design?

• Are there certain behaviors that are consistent with my highest performing employees?

Event monitoring gives you insights into adoption and user behaviors to help you optimize your application portfolio and business processes, so you can feel free to ask the tough questions.

Read how event monitoring can help you make more informed decisions.