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By Michael Allen, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Dynatrace's EMEA
 

Companies understand the importance of providing perfect customer journeys, but we have still seen a growing wave of digital service outages and software performance issues in recent months. While some of these problems were minor drawbacks, with online video streaming services or social media sites falling, others caused much more serious concern. Interruptions in online banking have left customers unable to pay their bills on time and problems with major payment systems have left shoppers unable to use their bank cards at checkout counters. Even the daily commute was affected, with disruptions on the train ticket website leaving people unable to buy a ticket to travel.
 
All of these problems seriously impair people's ability to live their daily lives. Therefore, they are becoming a growing concern for businesses and consumers. So, if companies understand the importance of avoiding these scenarios so clearly, why are they happening more often?
 
Technology is more and more complex - The increasing complexity of technological ecosystems is the biggest factor for the increase in incidents that affect the performance of organizations. Modern digital services are based on hybrid environments, with multiple clouds, platforms and connected technologies. These services, in general, are activated through microservices and dynamic containers, creating a scenario of constant changes to be managed continuously. For example: today, a single web or mobile transaction uses, on average, 35 different technology systems, and five years ago, that number was only 22. In this scenario, with digital transactions crossing a vast diversity of components and services, managing application performance manually has become an impossible task. After all, as technology systems become more complex, IT teams face enormous pressure to quickly identify and resolve the source of any problem. This will become increasingly critical with the advent of driverless cars and connected medical devices, which can cause major damage if affected by performance problems.
 
Automation can help overcome disruption barriers - There are several reasons why it is impossible for companies to manually manage their digital ecosystems. First, the infrastructure and technology platforms are being divided into several layers, a fact that requires new and specific monitoring tools so that teams can have total visibility into the performance of the network. In addition, new technologies are also highly dynamic and require constant updating of resources and analysis standards. In practice, it is this relationship of recurring changes that makes it impossible for teams to keep up with their modern IT environments using traditional monitoring tools, which were built for static environments. In response, organizations need to be able to automate as many technology processes and operations as possible. Companies must have the ability to automatically detect problems and, from then on, use artificial intelligence (AI) to pinpoint the root cause of failures accurately. Modern and automation features can also assist companies in their quest for automatic correction, so that the monitoring system can detect problems and apply corrections before there is a complete disruption. As a result, pressure from IT teams will ease, allowing leaders to focus on driving innovation, rather than spending hours to determine where a software performance problem comes from.
 
How to go the smart way - Although the move to the Cloud has made companies much more agile, the truth is that all this transformation has exponentially increased the complexity of digital ecosystems. As a result, we had a huge impact on the ability of organizations to successfully monitor the performance of their networks and to correct any problems quickly and efficiently. Now, Artificial Intelligence is the crucial novelty to combat this situation and return the analytical capacity to companies. Automation can make the process of detecting and correcting software performance failures much faster and more effective. Ultimately, this will allow IT teams to deliver more consistent and positive user experiences, generating far more value and opportunities for companies. Management intelligence solutions are available and it is essential that CIOs seek the high efficiency of services as a competitive differential for the success of operations.

Disclaimer: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies

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