
The recent pandemic has caused a huge shift in the way organizations and their workforce have had to quickly change in order to maintain operations. And there are many challenges that come with such a quick migration to supporting a remote workforce. To dive into this topic and gain a better understanding of the challenges and benefits with enabling cloud-based IT
infrastructure monitoring for hybrid environments, VMblog reached out to one of the industry's experts, Tej Redkar, the Chief Product Officer at LogicMonitor.
VMblog: What are some of the common
requests you are hearing from customers during this massive transition to the
cloud?
Tej Redkar: LogicMonitor received many
requests for remote monitoring capabilities after COVID-19 suddenly forced
customers to pivot their entire infrastructure to support a remote workforce.
This unexpected shift challenged IT teams to accelerate their digital
transformation initiatives in order to maintain a seamless digital experience
for both employees and customers. Without remote monitoring capabilities,
companies may experience issues in key business continuity technologies that
could impact availability, employee productivity, and business performance.
Customers are looking for
solutions that provide deeper visibility into the performance of their
business-critical applications and infrastructure as they struggle to
effectively manage their distributed workforces. IT infrastructure monitoring
that covers both on-premises and cloud technologies can help with this burden.
Our customers need to be able to monitor the cloud-based technologies that are
keeping their businesses up and running, like video conferencing applications
(Zoom, GoToMeeting, Citrix), productivity tools (Microsoft Office 365), cloud
applications, engineering services (like GitHub, Gitlab, AWS), VPNs, and ISP
connectivity.
With hybrid monitoring, IT
teams can monitor the status of these business-critical applications, collect
metrics on active and inactive users, view storage usage for their cloud plans,
and keep track of total meeting minutes, size, and count. Our customers come to
us for help in maintaining business continuity. This year has certainly helped
our customers pressure-test their IT infrastructure amid unexpected challenges
and come out stronger on the other side.
VMblog: What are some of the biggest
challenges that this accelerated transition presents?
Redkar: In this fast-paced digitized world, today's enterprises need to focus on three
main aspects of their business - customer experience, employee productivity,
and the digital infrastructure that empowers both. Just as abruptly as the
coronavirus pandemic dispersed society, company leaders were forced to make
swift adjustments to address the needs of their remote workforce and deliver a
digitized experience for customers. Accelerating digital transformation plans
is an inevitable imperative for most companies, as long as they're prepared to
invest their time and money to transition some or all of their infrastructure
from on-premises to the cloud.
However, cloud migration requires
not only the financial investment in SaaS tools, but also the IT team's
availability and expertise to help make this transition, which is increasingly
more difficult when much if not all of the workforce is operating outside of
the traditional office setting. Without a clear resolution to our remote
working days, failing to expand to the cloud can have further financial
implications from lost productivity and downtime to a poorly executed customer
experience, which is the last thing any company needs during this
pandemic.
VMblog: What does this mean for
on-premises solutions?
Redkar: According to a recent study
we conducted during the global coronavirus pandemic, 35% of IT decision-makers
said that their company workloads were housed on-premises prior to COVID-19.
Now that companies need more access to cloud technologies, such as
collaboration tools, data sharing, and VPN, the same group of IT leaders
anticipate a 13% decline in on-premises workloads by 2025.
I predict we will see rapid
growth in public and hybrid cloud environments, not only because it keeps
employees connected while dispersed, but because these cloud technologies help
companies save time and money, while providing a better experience and global
reach for their customers. Today, more than 90% of your bank transactions are
through the bank's mobile app instead of a physical branch. So, cloud enables
businesses to reach customers wherever they are in the world, providing a true
global experience. COVID-19 hasn't drastically changed the fate of on-premises
solutions, as they were already on the way out. However, COVID-19 has
drastically changed the timeline for this transition, and the companies who
adjust quickly will come out ahead.
VMblog: Does this mean the decline
of the hybrid cloud as well, or are there some things that just have to stay
on-prem?
Redkar: It's a fair assumption to
make that the vast majority of organizations will prioritize cloud migration
due to the many benefits it can provide. In the same study mentioned earlier,
more than three-quarters (78%) of IT leaders said that their company's
post-COVID-19 workloads will reside in the hybrid cloud. When asked how long
they think it will be before more than 95% of all public, private and hybrid
workloads run in the cloud, 74% of respondents said it will happen in the next
five years.
However, not all
organizations are able to fully migrate to the cloud, so the hybrid cloud model
is a great option. Transitioning to a hybrid cloud environment makes sense for
organizations in highly regulated industries like government and finance that
need SaaS applications for core services but can't fully move away from on-prem
for compliance reasons. Moving an entire enterprise infrastructure into the
cloud can also be too complex or costly for organizations that have made
significant investments in on-prem or homegrown solutions, in which case the
hybrid cloud represents a solid middle ground. Also, private cloud technologies
are modernizing through software-defined digitization that will help optimize
the overall hybrid-cloud landscape without losing significant business
capabilities.
VMblog: What benefits are
customers most excited about when it comes to enabling cloud-based IT
infrastructure monitoring for hybrid environments?
Redkar: The fundamental concept that customers have accepted is that they shouldn't be
running monitoring systems on their own, it defeats the purpose of monitoring.
On top of that, most IT infrastructure monitoring tools take months to
implement and rely on agents installed across all devices, which is
increasingly more difficult to accomplish when offices are currently closed. In
an era of remote work and digital transformation, modern enterprises can enjoy
many benefits from cloud-based IT infrastructure monitoring solutions. They are
easy to deploy, work seamlessly in hybrid infrastructure environments, can
scale to support growth, and monitor the entire stack to keep businesses up and
running.
In the long-run, companies
that implement cloud-based IT infrastructure monitoring save their IT teams
time and money, gain comprehensive visibility into their complex IT infrastructure
and reduce the risk of downtime. If companies deploy an intelligent
monitoring solution, they can also embrace the benefits of AIOps to prevent
problems before they start. At the end of the day, robust, cloud-based IT
infrastructure monitoring frees up IT teams to do more innovative, interesting
work and help move their businesses forward.
VMblog: What are some of the
biggest challenges you are helping customers address when enabling cloud-based
IT infrastructure monitoring?
Redkar: With cloud-based IT
infrastructure monitoring, customers can face and remediate challenges head on
including eliminating tool sprawl, maintaining data continuity, and gaining a
unified view into all components of their complex infrastructure. With this
type of visibility, IT teams can re-allocate their staff for more high-impact
projects, like digital transformation initiatives, instead of time-consuming
monitoring activities. Once IT teams can visualize their entire infrastructure,
they can better understand how to adapt to the changing needs of the business
and strategize the best ways to modernize and provide an improved customer
experience.
VMblog: Finally, you mentioned your recent study that your
company conducted, how can readers get a copy of this report?
Redkar: Absolutely, VMblog readers can download a copy of our Evolution of IT Research
Report to learn more. This is our global survey of 500 IT leaders which details the
impact COVID has had on their departments.
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