Tackling business complexities caused by rapid digital transformation deployments

By Abhilash Purushothaman, MD (India & SAARC), AppDynamics

Businesses across the world have spent a large part of the past year adjusting to the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic – focusing on the safety of their employees, activating work from home and making other essential shifts to minimise a commercial impact on their operations. They had to reconsider how to accomplish their goals and adapt their growth strategies to the ongoing crisis. COVID triggered an urgency in technology innovation and a demand for digital transformation at speed.

As technologists assess their next step, it’s increasingly clear that better visibility across the entire IT stack is essential and full-stack observability is quickly becoming a strategic priority for IT leaders.

Innovation under pressure
According to a new AppDynamics report ‘Agents of Transformation 2021: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability’ 89% of global technologists said they felt under immense pressure at work as a consequence of the pandemic. They implemented digital transformation projects faster in 2020 than in any previous year – on average three times faster. This stat will perhaps come as little surprise to those who have found themselves at the sharp end of their organisation’s response to the pandemic.

However, the research also reveals that technologists are now struggling to manage crippling IT & application complexity caused by rapid digital transformation. Many technologists fast-tracked the move towards cloud computing in order to respond to the changing needs of their organisation. But now they face the challenge of controlling systems both within and outside of the core IT estate. The end result is huge numbers of technologists struggling to manage overwhelming ‘data noise’, without the resources and support they need.

Indian technologists were found to be among the most badly affected. 75% of global technologists said they were struggling with this challenge, but the number rose to 86% when analysing technologists in India. It’s clear that IT & business application teams can no longer afford to rely on gut instinct when it comes to managing experience and performance.

Aligning technology performance with business outcome
To get a handle on this spiralling complexity, 95% of technologists agree that having real-time visibility across the entire IT estate is important. They appreciate the usefulness of having a single, unified observability platform to monitor and manage the full technology stack, instead of multiple, disjointed monitoring solutions.

Increasingly, full-stack observability – the ability to monitor the entire IT stack, from customer-facing applications down to core network and infrastructure – is seen as a solution to tackling these pressing challenges. But full-stack observability is not enough on its own.

A business perspective on full-stack observability is vital to bring technologists and business users to a common understanding when things go wrong, to cut through the noise and to pinpoint the most critical data and contextualise performance insights with real-time business metrics.

To deliver innovation goals over the next year it will be vital to monitor and contextually link technology performance to business outcomes such as customer experience, sales transactions, revenue metrics etc. so that technologists can prioritise actions based on what really matters to the business.

Through this business lens, technologists must see, understand and optimise what happens inside and beyond their IT architecture. This includes monitoring across infrastructure, network, security and technologies like public internet, cloud, microservices/APIs etc. which they don’t directly control.

Technologists will also need business context on every data point across the IT landscape allowing them to prioritise performance issues, alerts, and incidents by what impacts the business and user experience most.

Need for Speed
There is no doubt that the current crisis is having a significant impact on how businesses manage digital transformation. The pace of change within organisations is expected to accelerate further over the next year or so as enterprises continue to look to technology innovation to survive and thrive in a challenging marketplace. One of the biggest impending tasks will be the need to drive transformation at speed. It will put pressure on IT to deliver rapid and sustainable digital transformation to their organisation’s needs and deploy functions that unlock value quickly.

In today’s business environment, full-stack observability has become business critical. It will play a key role in delivering innovation goals and managing heightened levels of IT complexity resulting from the need of constant change. And time here is clearly of the essence. Three quarters (75%) of technologists believe that full-stack observability with a business context needs to be implemented within the next 12 months in order for their organisation to remain competitive. This approach is the most effective way of getting the best out of your IT infrastructure, especially in a cloud-first environment. Realising the potential of full-stack observability must now be a priority, more than ever.