For almost two years, IT departments have been responding to evolving business and customer needs. The challenge now is for businesses to deliver this pace of digital transformation on a sustainable basis. They need to move out of the responsive mode that plagues most IT departments and embed the processes and technologies to support digital transformation as a regular part of the business.
To do this, full-stack observability – the ability to monitor the entire IT property, from customer-facing applications to third-party services and core infrastructure – will become one of the most critical priorities for IT leaders during 2022. These solutions will help they tackle increasing levels of complexity, and adopt a more proactive approach to technology innovation and performance.
As organizations move toward cloud-native architecture to improve the efficiency and productivity of their IT Ops teams, and adopt a hybrid cloud approach to enable dynamic and agile application development techniques; they will need new solutions to manage and optimize the performance of their IT property. This means moving beyond current application monitoring and implementing full-stack observability and application security across a cloud-native architecture.
For the channel, there is now a huge, largely untapped opportunity to support customers as they transition to full-scale observability, to ensure they have the technology platforms, processes and capabilities in place to optimize their digital transformation efforts.
To help businesses tackle overwhelming IT complexity
As anyone working in the IT sector knows, technologists have felt the effects of constant innovation and a dramatic shift toward cloud computing. IT departments find themselves struggling to manage a fragmented, widespread IT environment, across a patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies. Many global technologists believe that the response to COVID-19 has created more IT complexity than they have ever experienced.
In response, IT departments recognized the need to monitor the full IT landscape, from client-facing applications to core infrastructure such as networking and security. But this enhanced surveillance has meant that technologists are now faced with high volumes of data from up and down their IT stack, and these data risks further add to the complexity and pressure.
Unfortunately, many technologists find themselves without the tools they need to make this mass of data meaningful and actionable insights. Technologists still rely on different, disconnected monitoring solutions, and this makes their day-to-day operations extremely challenging, if not impossible.
The consequences of this situation are severe – an inability to maximize the benefits of the digital transformation investment and the very real and persistent concerns that an IT performance problem could escalate into something incredibly damaging.
Take advantage of the full-stack observation capability
While technologists understand the need for unified visibility, most report at least one barrier they need to address in their organization in order to adopt full-scale observability and link this to business performance. These include concerns about technology integration and implementation, scalability, and how to build a business case to prove ROI.
This is where channel partners play a vital role in reducing the pressure on technologists during this difficult period. They must also provide them with the support and information they need to build a business case and execute it against a strategic implementation program.
Across all industries, partners are already accelerating the movement in hybrid IT environments, while focusing on recurring revenue, OPEX and SaaS. They must now demonstrate to clients how full-scale observability, cloud-native architecture, and application security underline this strategic shift.
Partners have a unique ability to look beyond the four areas of IT operations – AppOps and DevOps, NetOps, InfraOps, and SecOps – and take a holistic view on technology performance and optimization. They can help clients identify key use cases at an early stage and work with them to achieve their transformation goals.
The opportunity for partners to take on an existing application performance monitoring practice and extend this into a much larger, higher value full-stack observation practice is enormous. And those who are able to make that shift in the next 12 months will effectively build a new, largely undisputed market space where they can create and capture new demand.
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