Technologists in all sectors are finding it harder than ever to manage their technology stacks. Rapid digital transformation over the last few years has left technologists struggling to manage spiralling levels of complexity across a fragmented IT landscape and a patchwork of traditional, cloud and hybrid technologies.
The latest research from Cisco AppDynamics, the ‘Agents of Transformation 2022’ report, explores the challenges facing IT departments as they try to meet their organisations’ demands for accelerated innovation, while ensuring seamless digital experiences for customers and employees at all times. The research finds that 78% of global technologists now feel under continued pressure to deliver innovation more quickly and more than half (56%) admit to feeling some degree of burnout or disillusionment with their jobs.
Evidently, technologists need to take a different approach to consistently deliver the speed and scale of digital transformation that business leaders are now demanding. This means implementing new tools, platforms and processes which will enable them to adopt a more sustainable approach to innovation. And in particular, IT teams should look to automate issue detection and diagnosis for faster troubleshooting of performance issues and to ensure seamless digital experiences for end users. This will ease the pressure on technologists and enable them to focus on more strategic goals.
Taking a proactive approach to deliver accelerated innovation
Already we’re seeing IT teams looking to leave behind the firefighting of the last few years and to adopt a more strategic approach to innovation. They know that they can’t continue to operate on the back foot, overwhelmed by IT complexity and unable to cut through data noise from every corner of their IT estate.
The reality is though that accelerated innovation over the next 12 months will only increase complexity and bring even greater volumes of data into IT environments. The shift towards cloud-native technologies which we’re now seeing across all industries undoubtedly offers organisations an incredible platform to increase development velocity and to deliver compelling digital experiences to customers and employees. But it also represents a massive challenge (and a potentially crippling problem) for IT operations teams that are responsible for managing and optimising IT availability and performance.
Cloud-native technologies and the complexity challenge
Cloud-native technologies are built on highly distributed systems which rely on thousands of containers and spawn a massive volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) telemetry every second. Most technologists simply can’t filter through this data noise when troubleshooting application availability and performance problems caused by infrastructure-related issues that span across hybrid cloud environments.
Already, many technologists are struggling to get full and real-time visibility across their IT estates – but the shift to modern application stacks is set to exacerbate this problem many times over. IT teams are in real danger of being unable to perform their jobs properly. And the implications of this don’t bear thinking about – massive stress, anxiety and burnout for technologists, and outages and poor digital experiences for customers and employees. Put simply, no business can afford to risk this.
This is why it’s so important for organisations to implement a cloud-native observability solution now, to avoid massive problems down the line. Technologists need a purpose-built solution which simplifies the complexity of cloud-native application architectures and provides observability into highly dynamic and complex cloud-native applications, landscapes and architectures.
Critically, IT teams need to be able to monitor the health of key business transactions that are distributed across their technology landscape. If an issue is detected, they need to be able to follow the thread of the business transaction’s telemetry data, so they can quickly determine the root cause of issues, with fault domain isolation, and triage the issue to the correct teams for expedited resolution.
IT departments must embrace automation to deliver digital transformation
However, with technologists under so much strain and their workload growing all the time, they need more help. And this is where automation can play a big part, harnessing cutting-edge technologies to ease the burden on IT teams.
Technologists should be looking for a solution that combines observability with advanced AIOps functionality, providing intelligent insights into performance issues. Technologists should leverage the power of AIOps and business intelligence and infuse these capabilities into their cloud environments. This will enable them to automate issue detection and diagnosis using Machine Learning and provide insights for faster troubleshooting. Ultimately, it allows technologists to understand more quickly what really matters and enables them to prioritise their actions in the right places, based on business impact.
Encouragingly, technologists recognise the need for new solutions which will enable them to thrive and prosper as the next era of innovation gathers pace. 85% now regard full-stack observability as core to sustainable transformation and innovation in their organisation, and 75% state that their organisation will need to invest in advanced AI and hyper-automation within the next year.
The key now is for technologists to ensure they get the support, advice and resources they need to implement the right observability solution for their organisation, one that will remove the stress of managing IT performance and availability in an ever more fragmented and complex IT environment. By leaning on the power of AIOps and business intelligence, technologists can alleviate much of the pressure that they’re currently feeling and move away from the firefighting which is such a drain on their time and energy. They can take a more strategic approach to their work and enjoy the satisfaction that comes with delivering game-changing innovation for their organisations.
