The cloud has recently proven to be a vital tool for many organizations to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic by enabling employees to work from home. To me, COVID-19 has clearly shown that work doesn't need to happen at the office. It has strengthened our belief that working from home is going to be the norm for many.
The move to the cloud introduces many technical challenges, even though we're taking away some of the complexity of maintaining an extensive IT infrastructure. But we're also adding a new layer of complexity to an already complex IT landscape. Besides the technical shift, we'll also see a change in responsibility and accountability.
The Desktop is Not the Hard Part
Imagine moving your desktops over to the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) or Citrix Cloud. All of a sudden, Microsoft or Citrix are responsible for delivering the desktop that runs your applications to support your business. How far does the responsibility of the vendor reach? Is it just the infrastructure, or are they also responsible for the applications' availability and performance? Am I — as an IT director — still accountable, and how can I provide insights about this?
At the same time, we see an ever-increasing rate of change. To be able to handle this increased rate of growth, an organization shouldn't merely lift and shift their workloads to the cloud. Instead, they should also review and modernize their operations. Agile and DevOps have been around for quite some time in the realm of software development. We believe organizations should also incorporate these concepts into their IT management processes so they can facilitate change instead of controlling it.
Modernize Change Management
Guaranteeing the availability and user experience of the digital workplace and, thus, with employees' productivity and the continuity of the company should be the highest priority. On the one hand, by supporting the change management process with data about the impact a change will have on production systems and automating change in the digital workplace. On the other hand, by continuously testing production environments, including desktop applications (whether in the Cloud) for availability and performance and reporting on this clearly and simply.
Towards the future, we want to give substance to our "DevOps for Desktops" concept in which we want to plot the thinking of DevOps onto the digital workplace. Our vision is that deep integration of our automation and test platforms enables the customer to implement changes faster and with higher quality, both on-premises and in the cloud.
The Latest
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is fast becoming an essential aspect of modern IT operations, particularly in highly scaled, big data environments. As businesses and industries shift to the digital and embrace new IT infrastructures and technologies to remain operational and competitive, the need for a new approach for IT teams to find and manage the balance between launching new systems and features and ensuring these are intuitive, reliable, and friendly for end users has intensified as well ...
The most sophisticated observability practitioners (leaders) are able to cut downtime costs by 90%, from an estimated $23.8 million annually to just $2.5 million, compared to observability beginners, according to the State of Observability 2022 from Splunk in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group. What's more, leaders in observability are more innovative and more successful at achieving digital transformation outcomes and other initiatives ...
Programmatically tracked service level indicators (SLIs) are foundational to every site reliability engineering practice. When engineering teams have programmatic SLIs in place, they lessen the need to manually track performance and incident data. They're also able to reduce manual toil because our DevOps teams define the capabilities and metrics that define their SLI data, which they collect automatically — hence "programmatic" ...
Recently, a regional healthcare organization wanted to retire its legacy monitoring tools and adopt AIOps. The organization asked Windward Consulting to implement an AIOps strategy that would help streamline its outdated and unwieldy IT system management. Our team's AIOps implementation process helped this client and can help others in the industry too. Here's what my team did ...
You've likely heard it before: every business is a digital business. However, some businesses and sectors digitize more quickly than others. Healthcare has traditionally been on the slower side of digital transformation and technology adoption, but that's changing. As healthcare organizations roll out innovations at increasing velocity, they must build a long-term strategy for how they will maintain the uptime of their critical apps and services. And there's only one tool that can ensure this continuous availability in our modern IT ecosystems. AIOps can help IT Operations teams ensure the uptime of critical apps and services ...
Between 2012 to 2015 all of the hyperscalers attempted to use the legacy APM solutions to improve their own visibility. To no avail. The problem was that none of the previous generations of APM solutions could match the scaling demand, nor could they provide interoperability due to their proprietary and exclusive agentry ...
The DevOps journey begins by understanding a team's DevOps flow and identifying precisely what tasks deliver the best return on engineers' time when automated. The rest of this blog will help DevOps team managers by outlining what jobs can — and should be automated ...
A survey from Snow Software polled more than 500 IT leaders to determine the current state of cloud infrastructure. Nearly half of the IT leaders who responded agreed that cloud was critical to operations during the pandemic with the majority deploying a hybrid cloud strategy consisting of both public and private clouds. Unsurprisingly, over the last 12 months, the majority of respondents had increased overall cloud spend — a substantial increase over the 2020 findings ...
As we all know, the drastic changes in the world have caused the workforce to take a hybrid approach over the last two years. A lot of that time, being fully remote. With the back and forth between home and office, employees need ways to stay productive and access useful information necessary to complete their daily work. The ability to obtain a holistic view of data relevant to the user and get answers to topics, no matter the worker's location, is crucial for a successful and efficient hybrid working environment ...
For the past decade, Application Performance Management has been a capability provided by a very small and exclusive set of vendors. These vendors provided a bolt-on solution that provided monitoring capabilities without requiring developers to take ownership of instrumentation and monitoring. You may think of this as a benefit, but in reality, it was not ...
