By Michael Allen *
Let's get straight to the point: the world is increasingly digital and nothing suggests that we are close to stopping this movement. After all, as consumers turn more to online and mobile channels, the more today's global economy becomes dependent on technology. Not surprisingly, Gartner surveys predict that by 2020, more than 40% of corporate revenue will come from digital businesses.
Thus, as devices become more advanced and innovative, consumers also expect and demand new and exciting digital experiences from companies. As a result, this puts companies under pressure, requiring teams to find ways to drive digital transformation more quickly and to innovate more regularly - without sacrificing quality.
In this scenario, users expect the software offered to work perfectly at all times. Even more so today, in a world of declining brand loyalty, when a bad digital experience can quickly erode an operation's revenue. This creates an enigma for IT leaders: how to achieve the agility that the business requires, without risking everything in the process?
The rise of Cloud Computing
In order to solve this challenge, organizations are migrating their infrastructures and services to Cloud environments, taking advantage of the agility and stability that this type of technology offers. Companies that operate in the SaaS (Software as a Service) model began to change in 1999 and boosted new companies that started offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Now, more recently, many companies have begun to restructure applications using native Cloud architectures, such as microservices and dynamic containers, to allow them to function seamlessly in the digital age, creating even greater levels of agility.
Because of this rapid advance in the market, the current corporate IT landscape is almost unrecognizable even when compared to the reality seen a few years ago. The explosion of Cloud services from a multitude of providers has given organizations the opportunity to create the best IT ecosystems for their unique requirements, rather than using a fixed, closed solution from a single vendor.
As a result, companies are having to deal with increasingly complex environments, with multiple and Hybrid solutions based on the Cloud model. Modern IT environments span a wide range of cloud platforms and services, including provider resources and technologies ranging from AWS, OpenStack and Azure, to Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift, not to mention the variety of SaaS applications that are now widely implemented in most organizations.
The enigma of complexity
However, in addition to providing the agility that modern digital companies need to succeed, these new cloud environments are generating enormous complexity, making it almost impossible for IT teams to manage the user experience and optimize digital performance. efficiently. A recent survey by Dynatrace, for example, found that the average number of applications reached by a single mobile or web transaction has increased from 22 to 35 in the past five years. With the adoption of concepts such as dynamic microservices, containers and multicloud hybrid ecosystems, it is much more difficult to keep track of what is being done and how the environments are behaving.
Today, there are literally billions of extremely complex interdependencies between the components that make up digital services. This creates an almost infinite number of factors that can affect the user experience. As a result, it has become more difficult than ever to ensure that performance will not be an issue that can prevent customer clicks from converting into business revenue.
Especially because it is not only about billing, but also reputation. In today's connected, ultra-competitive digital economy, every customer counts, and a negative experience can have an incalculable impact on a company's image. Organizations, therefore, need to capture information for each user, across all devices, to ensure that all customers receive the VIP treatment they seek. Traditional approaches to performance monitoring are simply unable to provide this level of visibility, having been designed for static environments that have evolved slowly over time.
From the mists of performance management to success in native Cloud actions
Organizations, therefore, need to adopt new approaches to performance monitoring and user experience management to succeed in the Cloud world. The first step is to consolidate and unify the multiple monitoring solutions that have been accumulated organically in each of your IT departments in recent years. Separate panels that uniquely monitor a Cloud environment can be incredibly expensive, not to mention providing a fragmented view of the experience generated. Having end-to-end visibility, with a complete solution, is essential to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) and provide a holistic view of digital experience and performance across the enterprise.
It is also imperative to avoid just putting more "data on the table". IT teams no longer need panels to search, spending time and effort to manually configure and monitor them. They just need instant answers and insights on where they can optimize user experiences to maximize conversions. They need resources to instantly identify the exact source of any performance problems and suggest solutions, instead of just raising more questions. To this end, Artificial Intelligence and automation are becoming essential for performance management, allowing IT teams to automatically and real-time assess their entire IT ecosystem, analyzing the dependencies between infrastructure components and applications.
In a progressively centralized future in the Cloud, those who fail to adapt their approach to digital performance management will be increasingly confused by monitoring data that, in the end, provides a fragmented and outdated view of the user experience. Embracing the next generation approaches, with Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Brazilian leaders will have in their hands the key to success to achieve the maximum of innovation and the offer of perfect digital experiences.
Michael Allen * is Dynatrace's VP Worldwide Partners
Notice: 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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