James Harvey, CTO Adviser, EMEA, Cisco AppDynamics
James Harvey, CTO Adviser, EMEA, Cisco AppDynamics
For the past three years, organisations have expedited their digital transformation programmes in response to evolving customer needs and to enable hybrid work. In most cases, new applications and digital services have been rapidly developed by leveraging the capabilities of cloud-native technologies. Modern application stacks are enabling IT teams to significantly increase release velocity while fostering operational agility and resilience. Meanwhile, IT teams have to maintain on-premises technology for many of their business-critical applications and supporting infrastructure. As a result, technologists are now managing an increasingly sprawling and fragmented hybrid IT estate and, unfortunately, this is creating major issues.
According to the latest Cisco AppDynamics report titled “The Age of Application Observability”, technologists say that the shift to hybrid environments is leading to an expansion of attack surfaces and heightened vulnerability to cybersecurity threats. As application components operate across a mix of cloud-native platforms and on-premise databases, visibility gaps are being exposed, significantly increasing the risk of disruptions, downtimes and security breaches. The concern is that organisations risk jeopardising their innovation efforts due to their inability to optimise availability, performance and security within their applications and underlying infrastructure.
In response, an increasing number of organisations are now recognising the need to move beyond traditional application monitoring and embrace application observability as a means to navigate the complexity of their hybrid environments, thus ensuring that applications consistently operate at peak performance. Application observability provides IT teams with unified visibility across both on-premises and cloud-native environments while correlating IT performance data with business metrics. This allows IT leaders to track and report on the outcomes of their investments and deliver rapid innovation in a more sustainable manner.
Cloud-native technologies and data explosion
As anyone who has worked with cloud-native technologies knows, microservices and containers generate overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and data traces. At present, most IT teams do not have a method to cut through this data noise. Additionally, they lack a clear line of sight of the entire application path, where components are dispersed across both cloud-native and on-premises technologies because they continue to deploy separate tools to monitor different environments.
According to the report, 78 per cent of technologists claim that the increased volume of data from multi-cloud and hybrid environments renders manual monitoring impossible. IT teams do not have the visibility and insights they need to quickly troubleshoot and prioritise issues that have the potential to adversely affect end-user experience. As a result, this leads to added pressure on the IT department and increased mean time to resolution.
Application observability
Technologists are acutely aware of the limitations of their existing monitoring methods and the necessity to adopt new approaches. In fact, as many as 97 per cent believe that their organisations must transition from a traditional application monitoring approach to an application observability solution to manage a multi-cloud and hybrid environment. Encouragingly, 53 per cent claim that their organisation is already analysing application observability solutions, and 44 per cent report that they will do so in the next 12 months.
Application observability allows IT teams to take a more proactive approach to managing their hybrid IT environment, integrating security into the application life cycle from the outset and bringing teams together around a single data source. This way, technologists can access deeper insights into each area of their IT estate, enabling them to detect issues, understand root causes and resolve them more quickly.
With innovation speeds expected to increase over the coming years, application observability allows organisations to embed speed and agility into their development processes. This allows IT teams to remain proactive rather than being stuck in firefighting mode.
Organisations can adopt a more controlled and sustainable approach to innovation, directing their time and resources where they will have the biggest impact on both customers and the business. Indeed, 88 per cent of technologists claim that integrating observability within business contexts will enable them to be more strategic and allocate more time for innovation.
Of course, application observability on its own is not sufficient to consistently deliver accelerated innovation. IT leaders must recruit and cultivate the necessary skills to develop and manage applications within a hybrid environment, foster greater collaboration among teams and work with the right strategic partners. Undoubtedly, application observability provides the foundation for all these efforts – which is why 85 per cent of technologists state that it has become a strategic priority for their organisations.
