Every year, predictions about what’s next in business technology abound. And yet, in the ongoing pandemic environment, it may be easier than ever to anticipate which kinds of technology will be most important in the coming months. Your IT stack, for instance, is probably sorely lacking in two critical areas, even as you reap the benefits of an accelerated digital transformation strategy.
The abrupt shift to remote work caused many organizations to prioritize cloud adoption in areas like communications, collaboration technology, networking, and security. The advances in these areas made it possible for teams to work from anywhere, all while saving resources, improving productivity, and speeding decision-making.
Even so, companies are finding that this approach is preventing their teams from reaping the full benefits of their digital investments. Site reliability engineering (SRE), an approach that utilizes software to automate and increase observability in the IT stack, has been adopted by few companies. The problem is a significant challenge: a partially digitized IT environment. There are tools that have sped up business through applications, but operations and IT infrastructure remain mostly the same. It’s a fragmented framework that prevents companies from becoming fully digital.
Let’s take a deeper look at these two elements that IT teams should be prioritizing to gain the most possible benefit from digital investments:
Observability: Companies are missing the insights that allow them to drill down to the cause of an outage or a performance issue. The significance of this gap is clear when you consider the need to rapidly analyze digital clues to resolve issues. The ability to capture every signal from a client, the network, or another data source is often the key to locating a problem and resolving it.
There is a major transformation occurring in the area of observability, with technology moving in the direction of full-stack observability. This movement focuses on increased convergence across all domains and standardizing operational data in its generation and formatting. It will be increasingly seen across areas like infrastructure, storage, security, and networking.
Automation: Businesses need to capture the potential for automation in their IT stack by putting into place the kind of automation that fuses data and actions to business outcomes. This is the heart of SRE, the practices that focus on business measures that impact the user experience. These include not just performance and availability, but also areas like security and privacy. The importance of these areas becomes clear when considering how enforcement of security policies directly affects performance.
These areas are expected to gain momentum in the following months, but are unlikely to see maturity. The IT architecture remains a heterogeneous environment with sprawl that extends to the data center, the cloud, and edge locations that make standardization challenging. For instance, developing consistent policy for security that is applicable across a multi-cloud deployment presents significant challenges for business organizations.
For many IT teams, automation skills like application programming interfaces (APIs), languages, and coding will be important for using insights to create meaningful action. It may benefit your IT team to begin investing in the upskilling and training necessary to equip employees for automation opportunities that should continue to emerge in the coming months.
If your company is pursuing digital transformation, but your IT stack remains lackluster in terms of a fully visible and automated environment, contact us at IT Broker.com. We can help you identify ideal areas for SRE and the solutions that best equip you for an optimized transformation.
