By: Bryan Hamman - Regional Director: Africa at NETSCOUT

As enterprises across Africa continue to adopt Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to support their geographically dispersed operations, the complexity of maintaining these critical tools at remote site locations has escalated. This poses significant challenges for IT teams tasked with ensuring optimal performance and security of systems and applications across all sites and branches, no matter where they are located.

The Middle East & Africa (MEA) region's UCaaS market underscores this trend, with revenues projected to reach approximately USD 15 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 percent from 2025 to 2030. This development reflects the increasing reliance on UCaaS solutions across the region.

However, without continuous monitoring of the entire ecosystem, IT departments may find themselves in the dark when issues arise, as problems can originate from various locations or involve multiple vendors. This lack of transparency can jeopardises not only user experience, but also business continuity and productivity.

NETSCOUT's annual UCaaS Survey revealed that 76 percent of IT teams require anywhere from several hours to a week to resolve UCaaS issues in central offices, and 71 percent report similar timeframes for SaaS-related problems. The challenges are even more pronounced at remote sites due to their inherent complexities.

Remote sites compound network performance challenges

The expansion of businesses into remote locations with widely dispersed employees - ranging from regional branch offices and distribution centres to retail outlets, medical centres and factories - has intensified the demand for reliable connectivity. The NETSCOUT UCaaS Survey indicated that 55 percent of enterprise organisations support 26 or more remote sites, each with very specific operational requirements.

Often, these remote sites lack on-site IT resources, complicating the monitoring of network and application performance. With data traffic traversing the internet, cloud platforms and virtual data centres to reach these locations, troubleshooting becomes a formidable task. IT teams face mounting pressure to ensure network and application performance, as any lapse can lead to diminished user experiences, productivity losses and negative financial impacts.

The need for visibility at the edge

Achieving visibility at the business edge is crucial for assessing the performance of secure access service edge (SASE) technologies and SaaS applications over various connectivity options, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. A lack of observability can result in lengthy troubleshooting processes, often devolving into blame games due to unclear problem ownership.

Without high-quality data, IT teams are relegated to reactive stances, addressing issues only after user complaints arise. This reactive approach hampers efforts to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), especially in highly distributed enterprises.

The secret to remote observability: Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is pivotal for effective observability at remote sites. DPI is a technique for analysing the data in each network packet - a multi-byte unit of data transmitted at one time by a host, such as a server, on a network - for security and performance insights. This is done to prevent visibility gaps and assure the performance of remote-site operations. Continuous performance monitoring is essential for delivering high-quality, positive user experiences no matter where those users are accessing the network and applications.

NETSCOUT's nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution offers pervasive visibility by implementing DPI across all infrastructure points, extending to the business edge. This approach ensures DPI capabilities regardless of workload locations or user environments.

The solution's scalable architecture accommodates enterprises of varying sizes and complexities, encompassing data centres, offices, user locations, colocations and multiple cloud environments. By distilling vast packet data into meaningful metadata - referred to as Smart Data - in real-time, it facilitates targeted, higher-level analysis. This enables IT teams to proactively detect, isolate and resolve issues, enabling informed decision-making and expedited problem resolution.