Industry drivers causing rapid change to the Manufacturer's IT infrastructure:
Today's manufacturer is constantly under threat from “leaner,” more streamlined competitors who are able to quickly produce and supply their customers with newer goods at a lower cost. The only way to overtake this threat is to drive performance through more sophisticated levels of information management.
Globalization:
Expanding globalization is opening up new supply lines, new factories, and new markets. The large manufacturing enterprise must be equipped with efficient standardized processes to implement in each new environment. Every IT branch of the manufacturing enterprise must be visible, secure, and compliant with regional regulations.
Regulations for Public Companies:
Large manufacturers, like all publicly traded companies, are subject to regulations regarding information access and accountability. The 2002 US Sarbanes-Oxley Act(SOX)requires companies to assess any risk associated with information technology or the internal process that may impact the accurate and timely reporting of certain sensitive information.
Need for Effective, Standardized Information Flow:
The continuous flow of relevant information between need-to-know parties is the cornerstone of operational excellence in the Manufacturing Industry: R&D must collaborate and coordinate with suppliers, plant engineers and corporate office; sales and support must have access to real-time customer, inventory and logistical information; and corporate office needs to know what customers / products / events are negatively or positively impacting the supply chain.
If accurate, up-to-date information is not continuously available a manufacturer's competitive performance can be severely diminished.
Achieving and maintaining a competitive edge depends not only on information flow but on the active management of that flow.
Costs:
With budget spent toward service and management systems that enable communication between various operations within the enterprise, the network monitoring infrastructure is often overlooked as an opportunity to create competitive advantage. Systems that enable communication, however, cannot be guaranteed safe or even purposeful if the network through which they operate is not adequately monitored for security and performance.
The pressure then becomes balancing a budget between higher level applications and the IT infrastructure that ultimately supports them; although the reality of any network monitoring deployment is that it can be needlessly costly if its architecture is not properly planned. | 
