Nyansa introduces private cloud option for its network analytics platform

Having a full understanding of end user experience has been theorized in IT circles for decades but has remained as elusive as the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth. Some people claim to have seen it, but no one really knows for sure.

Last year, an innovative startup, Nyansa, came to market with a new approach to end-user management. Its Voyance product continuously collects data, analyzes it and correlates every end user transaction across the wired and wireless networks and provides insights and actionable recommendations that can be taken to improve application performance.

+ Also on Network World: Nyansa brings a new approach to end-user management +

Voyance is delivered in a SaaS model, making it easy for customers to get started because cloud delivery means deployment with little to no disruption to the business. Companies are being flooded with new technologies, such as Wi-Fi, cloud applications, IoT and BYOD, which have steadily increased the complexity of the IT environment. This is why the interest in network analytics platforms has increased steadily over the past decade.

The SaaS model is ideal for many customers, but it isn’t for everyone for a number of reasons. The business may be in a heavily regulated vertical, such as financial services, government or healthcare, where company data cannot leave the premises. Or it could be an organization where IT wants greater control over operations and security. The key for solution providers is to offer deployment options to meet customers’ specific needs. 

Nyansa’s Voyance deployed via private cloud

This week, Nyansa made its Voyance solution available via private cloud for customers that need or simply prefer that model. All of the features and functions available from the Nyansa SaaS solution have been bundled together, so businesses can deploy it as a private cloud.

However, even within private cloud one size still does not fit all, and Nyansa has done a nice job creating different flavors of the private cloud version. Customers that want a turnkey solution can drop in a 1 RU “all in one” appliance. There is also a version that runs Voyance in a virtual machine. This option enables organizations to run the solution on their own hardware or in the Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure cloud.

The public and private cloud versions are at feature parity, but Nyansa did build some additional functions for the private cloud offering, including integration with existing Active Directory authentication domains and single sign-on support. Also, the appliance is designed for horizontal scaling. This last feature is important because it allows for unlimited data retention with no impact to network performance or architecture. 

From a vendor perspective, one of the concerns about public cloud versions is that customers often do not keep their solutions at the most current versions. With Nyansa, the crawler (data gathering component) is installed as a VM or an appliance. The backend analytics piece also resides in the private cloud. However, the solution does communicate with the Nyansa cloud over a secure connection. This is used for continuous software updates, application health metrics, heartbeats and customer support.

None of the data ever leaves the private cloud, but secure connection ensures customer deployments are always running with latest and greatest features. Given the speed at which technology evolves, this is important to ensure network operations “see” everything they should be. 

Pricing for private cloud version of Voyance

The private cloud version of Voyance is available for purchase now and starts at $65,000 for a one-year license that supports up to 250 nodes and 2,500 users. Nyansa offers some hefty discounts for multi-year options. For example, the 250 node/2500 tier costs $131,000 for three years and $196,500 for five years. Also, as the environment grows, the cost per user and node goes down. 

A Nyansa official told me any hardware costs involved are simply passed through. The company isn’t looking to make money as a hardware reseller. Rather it’s looking to use hardware to provide simpler deployment options. 

Digital transformation is putting pressure on IT to operate faster, but complexity makes that difficult to do that without putting the business at risk. Nyansa’s Voyance analytic solution aims to provide greater clarity into how thing are running through the lens of the end user. The private cloud version is an excellent option for customers in heavily regulated verticals or customers that want to maintain greater control over the data and related security.