By
Dave Wagner, Senior Manager, Product Marketing - Application Management, SolarWinds
Despite highs and lows in the market,
the economy was booming before the pandemic and businesses were largely focused
on one thing-growth.
IT teams everywhere were accelerating
their digital transformation strategy and investing in specific areas with the
intentions of increasing their market share. In the retail industry, IT
departments were working with brick-and-mortar stores to move services online to
reach more customers, and supply chains were implementing new IT services to increase
efficiencies. But then came COVID-19, and the world seemed to change fundamentally.
IT teams need to remember this wasn't the first time they experienced unpredictable
change. The market crash in October 1987 was the first time any exchanges had
ever hit 1 Billion share trade volumes; most systems failed to work, post-trade
settlements fell outside government mandates, and massive financial penalties
ensued. There have been many such "black swans" over the years with a serious impact
on businesses globally.
In these uncertain moments, we go into
crisis mode and tell ourselves once this blows over we'll focus on contingency
planning to avoid harsh repercussions in the future. However, more often than
not, once things get back to normal, we become complacent-it's human nature.
When the pandemic hit, IT departments had
to switch gears quickly and go into survival mode. With almost no notice, they
had to start adapting their infrastructures to meet unprecedented and
unpredictable demand requirements. Not only was this something IT
infrastructures were relatively unprepared for, but they felt enormous pressure
from leadership teams. Time was of the essence as teams tried to get huge workforces running remotely and adapt to completely unpredicted changes
in demand. The smallest mishap could have been the difference between a
business staying alive or going under.
Now, almost six months into the COVID-19
outbreak, IT infrastructure is much more stable. We're moving into discussions
about key learnings and how we can plan for the next "unknown."
Planning for Unpredictable Times
There's nothing IT teams hate more
than when "the unpredictable" comes knocking on the door.
This change in demand can lead to a bottleneck
effect with the potential to impede business. The main challenge is, even
though there are applications and infrastructure to support significant changes,
not everything is written in modern languages or stored in containers for
rapid, on-demand deployment in highly flexible and scalable cloud environments.
And despite a quick acceleration to the cloud, the back end of many hybrid
applications is likely still on-premises, which can put a great deal of stress on
the system.
As IT teams start to plan-as much as
they can-for moments of unpredictably, we expect there to be more adoption of
public clouds and containerized solutions because of their dynamic and elastic
capacity to meet changing demand. This will allow IT departments to be more
focused on implementing and strengthening these solutions for their
organizations. But making the shift from on-premises solutions isn't always
seamless, so IT pros will need to be careful about how they make these
switches.
When teams, their applications, and
their infrastructures were on-prem, they had access to dedicated capacity
planners for forecasting and scenario planning in advance of demand changes. But,
as current trends in demand growth continue to accelerate, it'll become more
difficult to plan. As a result, an ability to adapt will be integral to the
success of IT.
IT teams also need to prioritize adapting
services that have seen a collapse in demand to optimize IT costs. Take travel booking services for example.
These types of businesses were hit hard by the pandemic and are looking to squeeze
costs out of their supply chains and IT infrastructures without hurting the
business overall.
One of the best ways to know how to
adapt your IT infrastructure is through capturing metrics indicating these
performance needs by monitoring them. Monitoring the appropriate metrics allows
organizations to meet demand needs quickly without breaking anything by giving
IT pros the insight into the infrastructure they need to do this effectively-from
the database to storage solutions to the network-but all in the context of the
key business metrics: response time, throughput, and errors.
Businesses will continue to adopt new
online applications which will only further increase the need for application performance monitoring (APM). This will impact IT teams as they're going
to be asked to get their work done form home using only the tools they have-in
the best way they can. APM tools will be used to help IT pros see how systems
are operating and clarify exactly what the new normal looks like from the
perspective of the end users, especially as remote work becomes more standard.
Think One Step Ahead
While the first and biggest challenge
related to the pandemic was the massive shift to remote work and its impact on
infrastructures, organizations now clearly need to be thinking one step ahead
and preparing for other unplanned events in the future. Integrated monitoring
strategies will be a part of this, but capacity optimization will be just as
important.
Over the last few years, capacity
optimization hasn't been enforced as a discipline or priority-with organizations
instead focusing on business growth and market share. This said, the current
situation has clearly demonstrated capacity optimization needs to make a
comeback and start to once again be a focus area for IT teams. IT pros should look
more carefully at the amount and type of resources needed to be consumed by applications
for digital commerce to carefully optimize both the cost and ability to scale
elastically. In fact, you can't cut costs while minimizing risks to service
performance and availability without having proper capacity optimization
processes and instrumentation in place. Whether you're using cloud or on-prem technologies,
you need to worry about the noisy neighbor effect and contention for resources,
or a slowdown in service.
This isn't the first time IT teams
have been challenged and it won't be the last, but it's important now to
prioritize contingency planning. Extensive scenario planning for both dynamic
infrastructural capacity and cost-effectivity is now a must and IT pros should
ensure they have the right tools in place should the unthinkable happen-again. Full-stack
APM for all apps and infrastructure meets these requirement.
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About the Author
Dave Wagner is a
senior manager of product marketing at SolarWinds with over 20 years of
experience focused on IT performance and optimization. In his current role,
Dave works closely with product management and corporate marketing to ensure
alignment in go-to-market strategy and messaging for the SolarWinds application
performance monitoring (APM) products. Prior to joining SolarWinds, Dave served
as CTO of OpsDataStore, business development principal for TeamQuest, and vice
president, marketing and sales at Solution Labs Inc.