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App-Huggers: Thanks to Hybrid IT, Proactivity is Actually Getting Harder

How are you dealing with the reactive, crisis-driven realities of “Hybrid IT”?
Kevin McCartney

Does anyone really live in the beautifully homogenous, net and glossy modern cloud-based world depicted by analysts and marketers? You know — that wonderful “seamless, cloud-based” enterprise that promises to alleviate the myriad operational challenges of “old IT”? The answer, based on the CIOs I meet with, is absolutely “no.”

In fact, the “hybrid” IT environment of legacy plus cloud plus custom is a pretty chaotic mash-up that is tough to manage, to say the least. One of the most difficult aspects, according to anecdotal evidence uncovered in our discussions with senior IT executives, is proactive visibility and control at the application level.

Despite investments in tools and processes that are supposed to enable proactive and preventative support, senior IT executives say their day-to-day mode still tends to be crisis-driven and reactive. Additional layers of anecdotal or incidental feedback as well as “optical” or subjective input contribute to the reactivity.

Here are some actual soundbites from CIOs and other senior IT executives we’ve interviewed recently:

“It’s more complicated now; there are more layers. First it was just desktop, then server, and then shared resources, now all these layers. The customer is saying ‘what’s going on?’ No one knew what was going on. As a customer it’s very scary.”

“The trend is that everyone is marching toward a virtual environment when pieces of an app may run on public cloud, data center and private cloud. They all need to be tied together and management will be a nightmare without the right tool.”

“Applications were failing and nobody knew. When they did know, 20 people sat in a room passing the buck pointing fingers. Just everyone looking at their own bit and saying ‘it looks OK to me.’”

“The project leader is screaming, ‘we need this back up.’ Lots of frustration.”

“Even when the immediate issue gets resolved, we fear repeat because we didn’t know what happened. So the underlying issues weren’t fixed. We sometimes live in perpetual fear that it might happen again tomorrow.”

“We send and receive lots of email and go to lots of meetings. You’d think by having quarterly reviews with business owners you’d know the hot buttons -- but you’d be wrong. It’s the crisis du jour and how that impacts the technology plans.”

“In our business there are still too many ambulance drivers and not enough people investing in a plan.”

“The part we still struggle with is anecdotal. How do we capture this information and make it actionable? We have 5,000 transactions a month and 1 or 2 each month are negative. Unfortunately those are what you hear about in staff meetings.”

We are seeing the need for a new generation of application management tools that go far beyond the piece parts of the application — servers, network, databases and operating systems — to provide visibility and control at the application-level. As a result, IT departments see the application as a single entity — no matter what the application and whether it resides on your data center, your SaaS provider’s, in the cloud — or all three.

Since these new tools are designed for the real-world “Hybrid IT” environments, they will reduce the amount of reactivity that IT departments experience today.

Question: How are you dealing with the reactive, crisis-driven realities of “Hybrid IT”? What strategies are you using to create a “path to proactivity”?

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App-Huggers: Thanks to Hybrid IT, Proactivity is Actually Getting Harder

How are you dealing with the reactive, crisis-driven realities of “Hybrid IT”?
Kevin McCartney

Does anyone really live in the beautifully homogenous, net and glossy modern cloud-based world depicted by analysts and marketers? You know — that wonderful “seamless, cloud-based” enterprise that promises to alleviate the myriad operational challenges of “old IT”? The answer, based on the CIOs I meet with, is absolutely “no.”

In fact, the “hybrid” IT environment of legacy plus cloud plus custom is a pretty chaotic mash-up that is tough to manage, to say the least. One of the most difficult aspects, according to anecdotal evidence uncovered in our discussions with senior IT executives, is proactive visibility and control at the application level.

Despite investments in tools and processes that are supposed to enable proactive and preventative support, senior IT executives say their day-to-day mode still tends to be crisis-driven and reactive. Additional layers of anecdotal or incidental feedback as well as “optical” or subjective input contribute to the reactivity.

Here are some actual soundbites from CIOs and other senior IT executives we’ve interviewed recently:

“It’s more complicated now; there are more layers. First it was just desktop, then server, and then shared resources, now all these layers. The customer is saying ‘what’s going on?’ No one knew what was going on. As a customer it’s very scary.”

“The trend is that everyone is marching toward a virtual environment when pieces of an app may run on public cloud, data center and private cloud. They all need to be tied together and management will be a nightmare without the right tool.”

“Applications were failing and nobody knew. When they did know, 20 people sat in a room passing the buck pointing fingers. Just everyone looking at their own bit and saying ‘it looks OK to me.’”

“The project leader is screaming, ‘we need this back up.’ Lots of frustration.”

“Even when the immediate issue gets resolved, we fear repeat because we didn’t know what happened. So the underlying issues weren’t fixed. We sometimes live in perpetual fear that it might happen again tomorrow.”

“We send and receive lots of email and go to lots of meetings. You’d think by having quarterly reviews with business owners you’d know the hot buttons -- but you’d be wrong. It’s the crisis du jour and how that impacts the technology plans.”

“In our business there are still too many ambulance drivers and not enough people investing in a plan.”

“The part we still struggle with is anecdotal. How do we capture this information and make it actionable? We have 5,000 transactions a month and 1 or 2 each month are negative. Unfortunately those are what you hear about in staff meetings.”

We are seeing the need for a new generation of application management tools that go far beyond the piece parts of the application — servers, network, databases and operating systems — to provide visibility and control at the application-level. As a result, IT departments see the application as a single entity — no matter what the application and whether it resides on your data center, your SaaS provider’s, in the cloud — or all three.

Since these new tools are designed for the real-world “Hybrid IT” environments, they will reduce the amount of reactivity that IT departments experience today.

Question: How are you dealing with the reactive, crisis-driven realities of “Hybrid IT”? What strategies are you using to create a “path to proactivity”?

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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