This is the first installment of a series focused on AWS security. Click here to access part 2.

As businesses increasingly migrate operations to the cloud, ensuring security and efficiency becomes paramount. Cloud governance provides a structured framework that allows organizations to manage cloud services and resources effectively while minimizing risks and maximizing benefits. In this first installment of our cloud governance blog series, we will explore the fundamentals of cloud governance, the importance of implementing a robust framework, and best practices to ensure security and operational efficiency, drawing on insights from my experience as the Principal Cloud Strategist at WEI.

What Is Cloud Governance?

Cloud governance refers to the policies, procedures, and controls that organizations use to manage and secure their cloud environments. It encompasses the oversight and direction of cloud services, ensuring that they are used in a way that aligns with business objectives and regulatory requirements. Unlike traditional IT governance, cloud governance must account for the unique challenges and opportunities presented by cloud computing, such as scalability, on-demand resources, and shared responsibility with cloud service providers (CSPs).

The Importance of Cloud Governance

Effective cloud governance is essential for several reasons:

• Risk Management: By establishing clear policies and controls, organizations can mitigate security risks and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
• Cost Optimization: Cloud governance helps prevent unnecessary expenditures by implementing cost management practices and avoiding resource sprawl.
• Operational Efficiency: A well-defined governance framework enhances the efficiency of cloud operations through automation and standardized processes.
• Strategic Alignment: Ensures that cloud services are used in a manner that supports business goals and enhances overall performance.

When I first started working with the cloud, I saw how quickly and easily developers could spin up resources. But I also saw how things could get out of control without the right governance in place, especially through the practice of Shadow IT. Many cloud architects will witness fellow colleagues using all kinds of unauthorized cloud services and apps, creating security risks and compliance issues.

This is why I’m so passionate about helping organizations find the right balance between empowering builders and maintaining control. Shadow IT refers to using IT systems, devices, software, applications, and services without explicit approval from the IT department. While it can enable employees to be more productive and innovative, it also introduces serious security risks if left unchecked. Common risks of Shadow IT include:

• Data Breaches: Sensitive corporate data could be exposed if stored in unsanctioned cloud apps
• Compliance Violations: The use of unapproved services can violate regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI, etc.
• Lack of Visibility & Control: IT personnel lose visibility and control over where company data resides
• Inefficient Spending: Redundant services and lack of volume discounts can drive up costs

This is where a strong cloud governance framework comes in. By establishing approved services, enforcing policies, and monitoring usage, organizations can embrace the agility of the cloud while mitigating risks.

Cloud Governance Frameworks

Several cloud governance frameworks are available, each with its own approach to managing cloud environments. The AWS Five Pillars of a Well-Architected Framework is one of the most widely recognized. This framework provides a comprehensive set of best practices designed to help organizations build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure.

Best Practices for Cloud Governance

Let’s dive into some key best practices for each of the five pillars:

Security Management

• Active Security Configuration: Ensure that all security features provided by the CSP are actively configured and regularly updated. This includes access controls, encryption, and monitoring.
• Shared Responsibility: Understand and clearly define the security responsibilities shared between your organization and the CSP. Regularly assess and adjust security measures to meet evolving threats and requirements.

Cost Optimization

• Cost Management Controls: Implement basic cost management tools from day one. Use budgeting and monitoring tools to keep track of cloud expenditures.
• Avoid Resource Sprawl: Identify and eliminate unnecessary resources, such as unused virtual machines, outdated snapshots, and excessive backups. Implement policies for resource usage and cost allocation.

Operational Excellence

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Use IaC to automate the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure. This ensures consistency, compliance, and the ability to replicate environments quickly.
• Continuous Monitoring: Establish monitoring systems to track performance, usage, and security metrics. Use these insights to address issues and optimize operations proactively.

Performance Efficiency

• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Utilize PaaS offerings to reduce the burden of managing the underlying infrastructure. This allows your team to focus on developing and optimizing applications.
• Scalability & Flexibility: Design applications to leverage the scalability and flexibility of cloud resources. Implement auto-scaling and load balancing to handle varying workloads efficiently.

Reliability

• Failure Detection & Mitigation: Design systems that automatically detect and respond to failures. Use managed services for data redundancy and failover capabilities.
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Align SLAs with your reliability requirements and ensure that your cloud architecture meets the necessary uptime and performance standards.

Sustainability

• Maximize Utilization: Emphasize the importance of maximizing hardware utilization to improve energy efficiency. Optimize workloads and designs to ensure high utilization of hardware. For example, running one host at 60% utilization is more efficient than running two hosts at 30% each due to baseline power consumption. Additionally, it recommends minimizing idle resources, processing, and storage to further reduce overall energy consumption.

In the next part of our series, we’ll dive deeper into the challenges of cloud governance and explore strategies for overcoming them, including how to address shadow IT. Stay tuned!

Next Steps: In today’s cloud-driven world, ensuring meaningful security for an AWS environment is paramount for IT security leaders and the end users they protect. WEI Senior Cloud Architect & Strategist Keith Lafaso as he unveils the essential best practices to safeguard your cloud infrastructure. Listen below:

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Can you name a common promise that never comes to fruition? We have one – technology will eventually get simpler. Take the cloud for instance. At one point, this technology sounded as straightforward as could be. Just lift and shift business-critical applications from a legacy data center to a cloud provider! No more hardware or virtual infrastructure to manage and support! 

Truth is, modernized cloud application environments are highly complex, so much so that internal IT and data center monitoring tools can’t handle it without the right resources. Without these, IT operations teams run blind.

Why The Complexity?

Why are modern applications so complex today? Unlike monolithic applications that were hosted by individual VMs in an on-prem environment, modern applications are broken down into microservices that are each assigned a defined task or capability. Each container acts like a tiny server, which multiplies the number of endpoints that require monitoring. On top of that, many companies utilize multiple clouds to match each of their critical apps with their optimum cloud environment.

Companies believe this complexity is worth it because it allows for incredible agility to respond to fluctuating dynamic workloads and to serve users at a scale that monolithic applications could never achieve. For all these wonderful benefits, however, there are some real challenges:

• Container Orchestration: Applications are hosted within so many containers running in different environments.
• Security: Containers are more prone to security threats due to vulnerabilities, insecure configurations, and supply chain attacks
• Integration: Modernized container applications often integrate with other applications and services that require a deep understanding of different systems and interactions.
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Companies have invested heavily in monitoring tools over the years, but traditional monitoring tools don’t work in the dynamic world of speed and scale that cloud computing enables.
• Multiple Clouds: The use of multiple clouds creates learning curves for support personnel that must rotate through portal admin consoles.

The complexity of container ecospheres doesn’t stop there. Most companies that employ the cloud still utilize on-prem environments. Some of this is due to legacy applications that cannot be modernized. To avoid cloud lock-in, some organizations store their data in a separate data center adjacent to the cloud to avoid data transfer costs if they change cloud providers. Despite the complexity of it all, the benefits that modernized applications bring cannot be ignored. It is one of the reasons why predicts that almost two-thirds of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technology in 2025.

Internal IT Requires The Right Tools To Support The Cloud

There’s no doubt that IT teams are developing legitimate value-added innovation and containers can make this process easier. Developers can deploy microservices in different languages and technologies while time to market is reduced with added functionality. But all this innovation can’t be fully leveraged without the proper support from IT operation teams. For many organizations, IT operations aren’t modernized to do the job because the data center monitoring tools they are saddled with are not applicable to cloud applications.

• Infrastructures of data centers and cloud environments are fundamentally different. Data centers reside in a fixed location with dedicated hardware while cloud environments are distributed across shared hardware over dispersed locations.
• Data center applications often have static predictable workloads whereas cloud applications are highly elastic and scalable. Traditional monitoring tools may not be designed to keep up.
• Cloud applications are API-driven, and many traditional monitoring tools aren’t optimized for them.
• Traditional monitoring tools can’t act fast enough due to their reliance on human intervention and dashboard rotation.

When you consider everything, you begin to understand why say that monitoring containerized microservices in real-time is almost impossible.

How AIOps Makes Monitoring Containerized Microservices A Reality

It is possible to monitor containerized microservices to ensure that your cloud-based applications run optimally. But how? The answer is AI automation. Gartner states that many IT organizations who fail to adapt AI will no longer be operationally viable. Only automated AI systems can handle the scale, speed, complexity, and dynamic nature of today’s modernized applications that rely on cloud-hosted containers and microservices.

• AI monitoring can perform root cause analysis, enabling problems to be identified and resolved at speed.
• AI monitoring can handle large data sets from disparate systems and recognize when related anomalies occur within an environment. This helps prevent alert storms.
• When implemented into your integration and deployment pipelines, AI monitoring can ensure that problems are detected so that remediation or roll back processes can be implemented instantly.

In 2022, Forrester evaluated 11 AI for IT Operations (AIOps) providers and named Dynatrace a in that industry, giving them top scores in the Current Offering and Strategy categories. AIOps provides the ability to leverage machine learning and other AI technologies to automate and improve the performance, availability, and security of IT systems and applications. It only makes sense that a new application architecture requires a new operational approach.

Contact WEI to find out more how Dynatrace has the solutions you need to keep your IT operations in pace with your application innovations.

Next Steps: Thanks to Dynatrace, full stack application analytics and observability is fully achievable for your AWS-hosted application environments. Converting terabytes of data about your cloud application environment and converting it to real answers and actionable, intelligent automation, companies can maximize their modernized application strategies.

In this tech brief, we expand on:

• Application Modernization
• Cloud scalability
• Monitoring vs. observability

The post Why Modernized Applications Also Require Modernized IT Operations appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

According to , 92% of organizations adopted a multi-cloud approach in 2021. Cloud strategies allow your enterprise to increase flexibility, consistently update, foster greater agility, and enable rapid innovation. However, there are a number of common cloud adoption mistakes enterprises struggle with due to the lack of proper cloud strategy, planning, and governance mechanisms.

In this article, we identify the top seven cloud adoption mistakes and provide a roadmap to help your enterprise avoid them.

Top Seven Cloud Adoption Mistakes

As many organizations adopt the cloud, there are small mistakes being made that prevent them from developing a strong cloud strategy. Here are the top seven mistakes enterprises often make while adopting the cloud:

1. Maintaining an old infrastructure mindset.
2. Absence of upfront governance policies.
3. A lack of control provisioning resources.
4. Underutilizing the “pay-as-you-go” model.
5. Forsaking continuous cleanup.
6. Not pursuing a DevOps culture.
7. A lack of automated remediation capabilities.

Your Roadmap To Avoid Cloud Adoption Mistakes

Cloud adoption can be challenging; however, having a successful cloud strategy can make your transition as seamless and manageable as possible. The following roadmap can prevent your enterprise from making costly cloud adoption mistakes.

1. Change your mindset: Understand that your existing infrastructure may be incompatible with the cloud system. Assess what you have, your existing data center, and your business objectives and link them to your cloud adoption strategy.
2. Create customized governance policies: To prevent uncontrolled cloud spending and enable more accurate resource planning for each business unit, your enterprise must define each core governance structure and clearly articulate its processes.
3. Gain control over the provisioning process: Your enterprise must perform application and infrastructure vulnerability assessments regularly. Additionally, it’s imperative to have an established security checklist to ensure vulnerabilities don’t increase.
4. Utilize the “pay-as-you-go” model: Investing in a cloud management platform will help your enterprise save costs by tracking underutilized resources and identifying recurring expenditures.
5. Eliminate wasteful resources: Organizations must develop a “consume or eliminate” process. Using as-a-Service platforms makes managing the cloud more efficient by allowing you to monitor all resources to determine if they’re underutilized.
6. Incorporate a DevOps culture: Reduce manual effort and increase reliability within your IT and engineering teams with a culture that values DevOps. Enterprises experience higher business value and better alignment with IT through breaking down silos and building flexible, software-enabled infrastructures.
7. Understand cloud compliance and security: Take a security-first approach with a cloud infrastructure that sustains business continuity and compliance. This lowers costs, minimizes risks, and reduces complexities in the infrastructure.

How Nutanix Can Prevent Cloud Adoption Mistakes

Nutanix Beam is a multi-cloud governance service that provides enterprises deep visibility and rich analytics. It monitors your cloud consumption patterns and proactively identifies idle and underused resources. The solution also provides one-click fixes for cost optimization and security compliances across your cloud environment. This solution also identifies vulnerabilities in real-time using policy-based automation to resolve potential threats before they become concerns.

Beam will allow your enterprise to gain complete visibility, optimization, and control over your cloud consumption to ensure cost governance and security compliance. With Beam, you’ll have a successful cloud strategy that gives your developers the freedom to experiment and scale with ease, provision on-demand IT resources, and focus on rapid IT service delivery.

Here at WEI, we’re a trusted, independent resource to help vet cloud technologies, architectures, and the growing world of cloud service providers. We help enterprise IT teams to outline exactly what they need for an efficient, cost-effective cloud strategy. Contact WEI today to find out if Nutanix Beam is the best solution for your enterprise’s cloud strategy.

Next Steps: The recent challenges presented by the global pandemic showed how critical the need for greater elasticity really is. This has accelerated the transition to hybrid cloud architectures that utilize the appropriate mix of both private and public clouds. Today’s advanced HCI solutions are designed for this new era. Download our tech brief titled,

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In today’s multi-cloud era, desktop virtualization is at the top of the list of IT priorities for organizations of all sizes. Business leaders wish to deliver virtual desktops and applications that offer the flexibility to respond to rapidly changing demands without the complexities associated with managing on-premises infrastructure.

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is delivered as-a-service to your data center and edge locations. This allows business leaders to offload infrastructure management tasks and focus more on high-priority IT initiatives.

In the article below, we break down the top five desktop virtualization challenges in today’s multi-cloud environment and how VMware Cloud is helping to solve these challenges.

1. Selecting The Right Infrastructure

The public cloud operating model provides numerous advantages including increased business agility and economic benefits. This has led many organizations to shift away from on-premises infrastructures. Enterprises have sought solutions that enable migrating or extending the capabilities of their virtual desktop and application environments. However, a do-it-yourself approach can result in a less than ideal infrastructure that delivers inconsistent performance and places limitations on scaling.

for both traditional and modern applications. For customers that need to remain on-premises, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC simplifies your VDI deployment by delivering a best-in-class solution that enables organizations to take full advantage of the efficiencies of the public cloud operating system while eliminating the need to reskill staff or refactor applications.

2. Interoperability Between Deployments

As business leaders’ top priorities have become cloud adoption and desktop virtualization, environments have become increasingly heterogeneous. This has allowed organizations to take advantage of differentiated services, however it has also created a management challenge. To mitigate this challenge, enterprises need a platform that delivers unified infrastructure and operations, providing consistency across deployments.

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC brings a compelling value proposition to customers looking to extend capacity for VDI deployments. Applications teams can utilize existing tools, removing the friction of migrating desktops and applications to a new infrastructure.

3. Personalizing And Managing Your VDI Deployment

Enterprises face a pressing need to rapidly deliver a great user experience to remote workforces. For large scale deployments, balancing the need to deliver a seamless customized experience while ensuring security of applications and data presents tremendous challenges.

With on Dell EMC, customers can leverage the same enterprise-grade capabilities and tools used in their on-premises deployments. Business leaders can utilize the Just-in-time Management Platform (JMP) to deliver personalized, non-persistent desktops and applications in seconds.

4. Scaling To Meet Increased Demands

Capacity issues and resource constraints can result in costly consequences for any enterprise. The inability to respond to business needs and support rapid onboarding of new users negatively impacts productivity and profitability.

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC has the ability to support long-term growth and scale IT resources to meet increasing demands on business leaders. The portal also allows customers to add hosts as needed and offers sophisticated sizing tools to meet current requirements and anticipated needs.

5. Ensuring Security Of Desktops and Applications

Desktop virtualization can mitigate threats at endpoint, end-users error, and use sophisticated tactics against cybercriminals. Having the capability to modernize VDI infrastructures to defend against threats can be unmanageable and the reuse of established procedures and security protocols can be troublesome.

The on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC delivers consistent security features with full lifecycle management. Business leaders will no longer need to monitor for potential vulnerabilities in VDI deployments. Automatic testing and rollout of security patches eliminate the requirements to maintain numerous testing and staging environments. This reduced downtime saves business leaders time and money.

Interested In VMware Cloud On Dell EMC Solution?

Running virtual desktops and applications on-premises requires a significant investment in time and resources. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC provides an enterprise-grade, fully managed infrastructure-as-a-service solution that meets every challenge associated with managing on-premises VDI deployments.

NEXT STEPS: Get a full 360-degree view of VMware’s hybrid cloud solution in our white paper below.

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Companies have spent the past decade racing to achieve their digital transformation. One of the primary means of achieving this objective is through the cloud – a simple solution to a complex problem.

The problem is that there isn’t just one cloud. The found that “84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy.” Hybrid cloud environments are challenging enough by themselves, but things have grown even more complex due to the adoption of another IT architecture, edge computing. In a rush to migrate everything to the cloud, we found the cloud isn’t the optimal environment for everything in an enterprise.

Problems With Configuring Modern Environments

When it comes to cloud migration the hybrid cloud environment doesn’t necessarily equate to multi-cloud interoperability. Enterprises face challenges when it comes to integrating all their clouds into a single ecosphere in order to create a framework that routes workflows in an automated fashion amongst themselves.

The practice of uploading all data to the cloud for processing adds too much latency for some mission critical operations. Additionally, many companies have had to face real costs that often exceed those anticipated. While OPEX cost modeling has significant advantages over CAPEX, it doesn’t always equal lower expenses. Now, IT leaders find it cheaper to run things back on-premises. Enterprises need to attain a multi-cloud infrastructure in order to define and create policies to improve efficiencies, accelerate deployments and minimize security risks across their entire cloud portfolio.

How Nutanix Supports A Hybrid Multi-Cloud Environment

It’s obvious that enterprises can’t regress back to on-premise infrastructures. Too many executives have witnessed the enormous impact digital transformation has had in terms of greater innovation and profitability. The solution is a next-generation hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) HCI is cloud-like technology, but it isn’t restricted to the cloud.

is a combination of servers and storage in a distributed infrastructure platform with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace on-premise infrastructure. It consists of separate services, storage networks, and storage arrays. Advanced HCI solutions today can manage enterprise applications in a hybrid cloud environment. No more choosing between public or private cloud. The unifying nature of today’s leading HCI solutions puts you in charge of what goes where. Latency sensitive processes and compliance abiding applications can reside on local infrastructure while other apps can be assigned to their optimum cloud environment. On top of that, admins can then manage both their private and public cloud infrastructures through a single management plane, eliminating the need to bounce between interfaces and portals to manage everything.

Today’s advanced HCI solutions can create a borderless IT estate in which silos are a thing of the past. No need to purchase a bunch of servers and pair them with an external storage solution while connecting it all together with a network switch. Because they were purchased separately you never benefited from purchasing the best of breed for every component. You may have ended up with a complex mesh of compartmentalized equipment that required training and kept you in a proprietary lockdown. Additionally, the implementation and upgrade processes were so expensive, enterprises embraced the practice of oversizing their infrastructures for future growth.

How HCI Continues To Grow

The recent challenges presented by the global pandemic showed how critical the need for great elasticity really is in the . This has accelerated the transition to multi-cloud infrastructures that utilize the appropriate mix of both private and public clouds.

Today’s advanced Nutanix’s HCI solutions are designed for this new era. HCI allows you to create heterogeneous clusters that can accommodate hybrid cloud environments that include multiple CPU generations, all-flash storage, and multiple hypervisors. Additionally, HCI significantly condenses the footprint of your data center or edge computing environment. You also have the ability to choose your hardware preference. You can select the most optimal cloud for your apps and business needs. HCI has the potential to deliver turnkey infrastructure for any app at any scale, across any location, whether it’s an on-premises data center, computing edge location or public cloud service. This cross-platform mobility gives enterprises the duality to run enterprise applications through multi-cloud infrastructures without any code change.

In a world without borders, you need an enterprise hybrid cloud environment that is void of borders as well, one that provides frictionless agility, management simplicity and fractional consumption of services regardless of where they reside, Nutanix’s HCI is innately designed for this.

Next Steps: We’ve helped countless enterprise IT teams transform their business with Nutanix. Leverage our team’s knowledge and expertise to discuss how you can achieve a next-gen HCI solution customized for your business needs. Sign up for a commitment-free conversation with our Nutanix expert, Mark Gabryjelski today!

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How much are utilizing the cloud to support your business initiatives? Cloud environments offer immense benefit, especially as hybrid workforces gain traction. However, they also create unique challenges that legacy software, hardware and strategies are ill-equipped to handle.

One such challenge comes in the form of observability, or more specifically, the lack of it in cloud environments. Observability offers the chance to utilize collected data to improve user experience, reduce downtime, detect other issues that could negatively impact business, but traditional observability strategies just can’t keep up with today’s cloud environments.

In this second article in our two-part series on advanced observability, we’ll discuss how is addressing these challenges and what these solutions can do for your enterprise.

Learn more on this topic by checking out part one here.

Utilizing Automation For Scalability

In part one, we discussed some of the challenges associated with observability at scale. The problems can largely be boiled down to the following:

• The complexity of cloud environments.
• The ever-increasing volume of data and alerts.
• The resource and time commitment associated with monitoring microservices and containers.
• Siloed data.

According to a report from Dynatrace, “95% of applications in enterprise organizations are not monitored due to siloed tools and burdensome manual effort.”

A common solution is to try and tackle observability through adopting multiple siloed monitoring tools, but this approach only results in wasted resources and wasted time. Instead, enterprises must transform the way they collect and utilize data through artificial intelligence (AI) and .

Dynatrace is tacking this problem to offer enterprises continuous, automatic data collection and analysis, which translates to enterprise-grade scalability and end-to-end observability.

, which collects all monitored data within the environment, also automatically detects all applications, containers, services, processes, and infrastructure on start-up and in real-time. Instrumentation is also automatic, with zero configuration or code change. Data collection, including high-fidelity data like metrics, logs, and user experience data, begin as soon as the system component becomes available.

Auto-baselining is also included, with Dynatrace’s smart baselining adapting dynamically to environment changes. Finally, and perhaps best of all, updates are automatic as well, reducing ongoing maintenance through continuous, automatic, and secure updates throughout the entire environment.

Getting Context From Your Data

In environments where data is siloed, assessing the health of the system as a whole can be next to impossible. Alerts that may have a common cause can go unnoticed and the underlying issue unaddressed. For this reason, Dynatrace has prioritized offering contextual metadata to help administration teams understand what the raw data is telling them.

Using this metadata, Dynatrace creates a real-time topology map, which captures the relationships and dependencies for all system components up and down the stack, as well as horizontally between services, processes, and hosts. This map reveals the actual causal dependencies for the collected data, and also acts as a key foundational piece that enables the strategic use of AI in observability.

AI Offers The Answers IT Teams Need

Dynatrace’s AI engine, , takes the burden off of IT teams and automates anomaly root-cause analysis, reducing the manual efforts required for advanced observability.

To set it apart from other AI platforms, Dynatrace prioritized the following when designing Davis:

• Precise code-level root-cause analysis, which allows Davis to pinpoint malfunctioning components in milliseconds.
• Identification of bad deployments to offer the exact deployment or configuration change that caused an anomaly.
• Looking beyond the unknown. Davis looks beyond predefined anomaly thresholds to detect any unusual “change points” in the data.
• Automatic hypothesis testing before making real-time decisions.
• Removing repetitive model learning or guessing to move beyond machine learning approaches.

All in all, Dynatrace is reducing the manual aspects of advanced observability, making it simpler and easier for enterprises, regardless of the scale or complexity of the IT environment.

Ready for Advanced Observability?

As a leader in software intelligence, Dynatrace is simplifying cloud complexity and accelerating digital transformation for enterprises around the world. Instead of just more data and more time spent gathering it, Dynatrace offers solutions that help enterprises use the data they collect and offer improved business outcomes. Find out what you could be missing from your data and processes — contact WEI today to learn more about what’s possible with the Dynatrace platform and how you can leverage it for your business.

NEXT STEPS: Find out how Automation and AI is helping companies accelerate innovation for their customers and for their business. Check out our tech brief below to learn more.

The post How Observability with Dynatrace Can Improve Business Outcomes, Part 2 appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

How familiar are you with observability? The concept has gained traction as enterprises digitally transform their IT environments and embrace the cloud. For many companies, observability offers the chance to utilize collected data to improve user experience, reduce downtime, detect other issues that could negatively impact business, and more.

However, traditional observability strategies just can’t keep up with today’s cloud environments. The rapidly increasing size and complexity of these environments dwarfs manual instrumentation and performance tools, especially as enterprises need complete visibility into every component of their environments.

So, how can today’s enterprises achieve the level of observability they need, and most importantly, utilize their data to improve business outcomes? In the article below, we’ll discuss how Dynatrace is addressing these challenges and what these solutions can do for your enterprise.

Getting Answers Out Of Your Data

As shared in a from Dynatrace and WEI, observing data is just to start. By properly utilizing the observed data, enterprises can shift from just collecting data to using it to make decisions that produce the business outcomes they need to be successful.

However, actually poses a problem. Some IT teams try and tackle observability through adopting multiple siloed monitoring tools, which inevitably leads to wasted resources, wasted time spent on monitoring and manual configuration, and struggling to collect and share data between tools. To properly monitor applications at the enterprise level, companies need to transform the way they collect and utilize data.

To address this need, Dynatrace developed their , which expands on traditional observability through automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow it to scale to the largest and most complex of environments.

Through this platform, enterprises can utilize the built-in AI-assistance to continuously to detect anomalies, improve IT productivity, and give IT more time for business innovation.

Cloud Environments Demand More

While application performance monitoring has always existed, legacy solutions were built for a time when life, and the enterprise, moved much slower. Software updates were an annual event and infrastructure was contained on-premises.

Today’s IT teams have a different world to contend with. Cloud adoption requires IT to be flexible and ready for the unexpected. Most importantly, IT teams need to be able to predict where issues may occur, rather than waiting to react once they’ve already happened.

Advanced observability offers this and more, reducing the amount of time IT teams spend manually solving problems and keeping the lights on. Enterprise leadership expects more out of IT, and the technology they manage, than ever. Advanced observability allows IT to fulfill the needs of the modern enterprise and be a valuable, contributing part of the business, instead of just a cost-sink.

The Tools For Observability Success

Just as yesterday’s strategies can no longer be applied to today’s problems, the tools utilized by IT must also evolve.

To effectively manage the scale and complexity of the modern cloud environment, IT must rely on automation and AI. Legacy systems typically also focused only on collecting three specific data types: metrics, traces, and logs. However, this data on its own doesn’t offer the actionable insights.

To address this need, Dynatrace has developed , which is responsible for collecting all monitoring data within the monitored environment. It offers enterprises additional information, including user experience data, for “full-stack, end-to-end code-level observability.”

As shared by Dynatrace, this offers answers through three distinct capabilities:

• Continuous and automatic discovery and instrumentation, which ensures always-on coverage without manual configuration.
• Topology information, which offers context across the full-stack and for the data being observed.
• A causation-based AI engine, which offers actionable answers to problems through real-time analysis.

By combining software intelligence, automation, and AI, Dynatrace is helping enterprises make informed, intelligent business decisions, with fewer resources and time than traditional observability solutions.

Are You Looking To Start Your Journey To Advanced Observability?

As a leader in software intelligence, Dynatrace is simplifying cloud complexity and accelerating digital transformation for enterprises around the world. Instead of just more data and more time spent gathering it, Dynatrace offers solutions that help enterprises use the data they collect and offer improved business outcomes.

NEXT STEPS: Learn how Dynatrace transformed their own business and how you can too with automation, DevOps and AI in our new tech brief. Click below to start reading!

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When we look at how IT technology has changed within the enterprise over the past decade, we often point to the proliferation of virtualization and the cloud. That is understandable as these technologies have played significant roles in the digital transformation of the world today. Now that these technologies have become conventional standards within the enterprise today, there is another identifiable technology sector that has emerged in importance and stature – cloud and application monitoring. The growing presence of these solutions is a testament to the fact that enterprises are realizing the substantial benefit of application and performance monitoring across networks of growing complexity.

The accelerating presence of cloud and application monitoring

The growing size of the (APM) industry is reflective of its determined value. The size of the APM market is expected to grow from $7 billion in the year 2020 to a projected size of 11.9 billion by 2027. That is a compound annual growth rate of 11.2 percent over a seven-year period. These numbers may in fact prove too conservative as the APM market was previously forecasted to cap at $5 billion in 2019 at a CAGR of 12.8 percent. We find the same accelerating trends for cloud monitoring as well that is experiencing a CAGR of 18.1 percent. This market was valued at just over $1 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to $3.75 billion in 2027.

This accelerated growth is supported by the rising demand of cloud and mobile computing along with the technological advancement of performance monitoring. While funding costs have served as a traditional constraint in the past for growth, the biggest restraint for further growth is lack of awareness. While 76 percent of IT professionals in a survey last year said that monitoring the performance of their public cloud infrastructure is either moderately or very important, less than 20 percent said they can monitor these environments properly.

Observability and performance are essential

While enterprise managers have always relied on monitoring to some extent, APM today is proving a necessity in order to keep pace with the speed of business. That’s because the stakes are higher today, as are user expectations. While digital transformation has provided companies the means to inject continual innovation by enhancing the digital experience of its customers and employees, it has also magnified user expectations concerning those digital experiences. What’s more, in a world in which workloads can originate from anywhere and traffic loads can be scaled in real time, users have an innate dependency on their apps today like never before.

Monitoring translates into visibility. According to a report involving IT professionals from 15 countries, 48 percent of IT professional attribute delays with troubleshooting application performance issues with a lack of visibility, while 38 percent blamed it on application outages. Lack of visibility however is not a new problem however, but instead is one that has grown in correlation to expanding enterprises and network complexities.

But visibility alone isn’t exactly enough, you need advanced observability. The concept of observability is gaining rapid momentum as companies accelerate their digital transformation strategies by building out massive cloud-native environments that are hard to observe and operate due to their dynamic and complex nature. Let’s take a closer look at what observability is all about and why it’s critical.

What is observability and why does it matter?

According to Dynatrace (who in 2020 was named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for APM for the 10th consecutive time) defines observability as:
Observability is the extent to which the internal states of a system can be inferred from externally available data. An observable software system provides the ability to understand any issue that arises. Conventionally, the three pillars of observability data are metrics, logs and traces.

Dynatrace extends this with UX and topology information. However, turning data into answers requires more than just visibility, which is why they stress the criticality of observability. Dynatrace advances observability with contextual information, artificial intelligence, and automation, removing blind spots, and fueling rapid remediation that aides in continuous delivery for superior customer experience. Essentially, they are saying that advanced observability is what turns data into answers.

Three key factors necessary for advanced observability

Observability, when combined with AI and automation, holds the promise to deliver the actionable answers needed to ensure cloud native applications work perfectly and deliver the best experience and value possible to their users.

1. Contextual information – Understand the full context of the observed data from user impact through entity interdependencies. Real-time topology mapping provides context across the full stack. captures and unifies the dependencies between all observability data in order to intelligently combine metrics, logs, traces and user experience data. This real-time entity topology map is the basis for advanced observability.

2. Causation-based AI – Provide actionable answers to performance problems through a precise root-cause analysis. Dynatrace’s AI system, known as Davis, automates anomaly root-cause analysis, even in dynamic microservice environments. Traditional monitoring tools offer little beyond dashboard visualizations, forcing manual root-cause analysis. Dynatrace is the only platform that takes the burden off human operators, by providing precise answers.

3. Automatic discovery and instrumentation – Ensure scalability and complete coverage in highly dynamic environments without manual configuration. The Dynatrace OneAgent discovers all processes running on the host and automatically activates instrumentation specifically for your stack. High-fidelity data is automatically and continually gathered in context without manual configuration or scripting, and new components get auto-instrumented on the fly.

New opportunities that observability can give to your Business

Regardless of your business, you most likely have a digital pipeline and the health of that pipeline is integral to your company’s operations and mission. Your customers depend on the uninterrupted flow of and software releases through that virtual conduit. It is your highway of value-adding innovation. When Dynatrace assigned their top talent and engineers to figure out what APM would look like in 2020, they ended up redefining the architecture and expectations of application monitoring itself. A case in point is the remediation process of their own internal software bugs. Rather than identify the full gamut of bugs for their new software releases in production, they now identify and remediate 94 percent of them in development thanks to the power of the Davis AI engine. This makes their software more dependable, which in turn makes their customer environments more reliable.

And then there is the unique ability to see into the user experience itself. With Dynatrace, you can even replay user sessions to see exactly what users see. Like a coach reviewing film, you can now fully evaluate user work sessions in order to better guarantee the performance that users have now come to expect.
Imagine having the power to know how much revenue is generated by each of your applications or having the certainty that SLAs and compliances are being met. These are part of the answers that Dynatrace can provide, making it more than just APM solution. With the opportunities it can provide your organization, Dynatrace is a revenue generating application.

What’s Next?

Whatever your traditional concept of application performance monitoring was before, now is the time to discover what Dynatrace is all about. WEI’s team is well versed in the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform and can help guide your team’s implementation with all best practices baked right into the process. Contact us today to learn how Dynatrace can uncover valuable data across your infrastructure”¦ in 5 minutes or less.

Continue learning more about automation and continuous delivery in our tech brief below, “How to Accelerate Your Business Transformation with DevOps and Automation.”

The post Why Observability is a Game Changer for Cloud and APM appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

The Digital Transformations that the world has undergone has led to an insatiable appetite for applications and built a robust reliance on them. This reliance on apps and infrastructure has been greatly magnified this past year by the absence of physical face to face contact stemming from remote work strategies. Because your business is dependent on applications, the performance of your business is tied to the performance levels of your applications. Now compound this with the great cloud migration, and it becomes challenging to discern what is truly happening out there with your apps and the cloud(s) in which they reside. These are but some of the reasons why your enterprise needs a Cloud and Application Monitoring solution that is built with the future in mind. Below are some of the benefits you can derive from a premier APM solution, such as Dynatrace.

1. Continuously learn your environment

Proper inventory management is imperative for any retail or manufacturing company. If you don’t know what’s in your warehouses, then you don’t know the actual financial status of your business. The key is to put all of your inventory to work. Think of your enterprise network in the same way. Beneath your critical applications is a complete underground of underlying components and dependencies that make up the application stack. Undoubtedly, there is a fair percentage of this undergrowth that your IT team isn’t aware of. Chances are, there are a number of weak links in the application chain in these gray areas. Weak links create weak performance.

A premier cloud and application monitoring solution adds clarity to the full application stack. It can map dependencies between components such as processes, services, and hosts both horizontally and vertically. This allows you and AI-driven intelligence to truly understand the call relationships between these dependencies. This knowledge then allows for an intelligence based APM solution to pinpoint potential problems that can impact performance.

2. A greater reliance on applications

People have been using applications since the dawn of the PC. The reliance that employees and customers have with their involved applications today is unprecedented, however. When there is a disruption in a Zoom, Teams, or Slack session, the meeting stops and frustration builds. When a disruption occurs within your ecommerce application, money transactions stop. When your CRM doesn’t function correctly, the help desk lights up with call. Disruption is a dirty word today when it comes to enterprise applications. That is why observability is so important. A solution such as Dynatrace, provides a that can prevent problems before users see them, thus keeping your revenue generating sessions running as expected.

3. Stop playing detective

So, here’s how the traditional application monitoring process played out. The monitoring system consistently fed your admin support team with droves of log files. That backlog required the laborious task of sifting through all of the noise in order to piece the puzzle together. Let’s face it. Your IT team doesn’t have the time for that anymore, nor does your business have the money to finance it.

While some APM solutions dress up these logs with snazzy charts and dashboards, they still don’t provide answers. That is changing, however. Modern observability solutions created for today’s digital transformation trends, such as the Dynatrace , are designed to deliver answers, not endless logs that no one wants to read. Dynatrace AI uncovers the root of the problem in order to automatically discover and prioritize answers to issues instantly. Your company doesn’t have time for disruption, nor does it have time to solve them. In some cases, problems are remediated by the time your admins are notified. That’s a major improvement from traditional monitoring processes.

4. Automate cloud operations

Why have so many enterprises migrated resources to the cloud in the past decade? One of the chief reasons is scalability. Enterprises today have the ability to match resources with workload demand in real time thanks to the ease at which servers, services and software defined components can be spun up and retired. Shouldn’t your APM solution be able to scale in equal fashion? Cloud monitoring offers you the same levels of scalability and flexibility as any other cloud-based solution within your environments. It can also provide you valuable insight into which clouds are being used for specific applications and data queries.

With Dynatrace you can simplify cloud operations through AI and automation to build and run cloud native apps faster. 

5. Compliance and SLA & SLO confirmation

While there are a great many benefits to cloud computing, there is always a presence of nagging uncertainty. How certain are you that your SLA performance agreements are being delivered? How do you know if your company is meeting its security compliance requirements? APM can help clear up these uncertainties, giving you the insights and information to show you what is truly going on within your on-premises facilities, as well as that murky location we all know as the .

6. Eliminate inefficiencies across your IT environment

A big part of managing a business is maximizing the efficiencies of the involved departments. Maximizing the efficiency of your shipping or manufacturing departments leads to greater profitability. Now think about efficiency in term of your IT environment. Maximizing the efficiencies of your application stacks can significantly enhance the digital user experience. An effective APM goes further by focusing on environment optimization, locating looping code, excess DB calls or those extra network hops that have plagued you for years. It can also eliminate duplicative work efforts for your staff by automating monitoring functions that were once manually driven. By providing granular directives to your support staff, issues can be dealt with in record time, saving you labor hours.

One more thing

We would be remiss not to talk about the power of self-healing. No, this blog is not about to take a turn toward meditation and breathing exercises. What we are talking about here is automating remediation and building reliable solutions. AI is a great tool for identifying and remediating issues, but you need a solution that enables you to use that insight to build resilient systems. Leveraging modern monitoring tools enables you to execute specific remediation actions in a much smarter and efficient way. If you give the ability to embed Dynatrace into their delivery pipeline they can get feedback right away, which enables early optimization.

Andreas Grabner from Dynatrace goes into greater detail about Site Reliability Engineering and the self-healing capabilities of Dynatrace in his blog article here:

Next Steps: In the time you have read this article, an APM could have already averted a disrupting event within your enterprise. There are a lot more than six benefits that can be derived from an intelligence based APM solution such as Dynatrace. We invite you to reach out to our subject matter experts here at WEI to find out all of the ways that a software intelligence solution driven by automation and AI can benefit your company today.

Continue learning more about automation and continuous delivery in our tech brief below, “How to Accelerate Your Business Transformation with DevOps and Automation.”

The post 6 Reasons Why You Need Cloud Observability appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.