IT Trends 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance - Part 2
May 01, 2018

Leon Adato
SolarWinds

Share this

If IT professionals want to be instrumental to their organization's successful digital transformation journey, they should continue prioritizing a hybrid IT environment while simultaneously developing new skillsets and leveraging emerging technologies.

To help IT professionals arm themselves with a new set of skills, technologies, and resources to bridge the leadership gap and manage the intersection of hype and performance, consider the following recommendations.

Start with: IT Trends 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance - Part 1

1. Concentrate on Containers

Because delivering organizational value is a constant goal, IT professionals should continue to prioritize container deployment, both from an investment and skills-development perspective.

For IT professionals seeking to concentrate on containers, they should first find out if the IT organization is already working with the technology. If it is, get to know the people involved and engage with them. If the IT organization is not working with containers, IT professionals can simply find resources or platforms online. There are also communities like GitHub that allow container experts to freely share their knowledge. Once IT professionals learn how containers work, they should start learning about container automation and orchestration to enable a bridge into scaling the integration and delivery of distributed apps and cloud deployments, all while opening a path to greater understanding of how those workloads are managed.

2. Cloud Power-Up

IT professionals are beginning to consume different service delivery models, like moving from Microsoft Exchange Servers to Office 365, and migrate more of their mission-critical applications to the cloud.

In parallel with these changes, there must be increased observability — leveraging combined metrics, logs, and application traces for controllability — built into an organization's cloud monitoring strategy. This degree of monitoring with discipline must carry forward the same level of granularity and source of truth that has existed in on-premises environments for decades. The key part of this process is establishing a baseline of observability within their hybrid IT environments across the entirety of their cloud-based applications.

3. Bridge the Leadership Gap

There will continue to be a great deal of excitement around ML and AI in the foreseeable future. As we saw with cloud, executives are eager to implement the technology, which promises the hyped benefits of disruptive innovation, and want to activate a new technology quickly without the experience to understand current capabilities, technical complexities, or deployment challenges. The best course of action for IT professionals is to become educators: identify ways to discuss the basics, the specific cost-benefit analysis of how the technology will benefit the business, and what it means for service integration and service delivery.

4. Embrace Resiliency and Reliability as Performance Metrics

To achieve digital transformation success, it's imperative that IT professionals begin to embrace resiliency and reliability of their environments as critical performance metrics.

Resiliency and reliability underscore the business value that IT professionals can bring to fruition for their organizations. They also represent measures of how well a distributed application was integrated and delivered; and because they also represent overall performance, these metrics translate into dollar values. With the stakes so high, the ability to ensure the end-user's digital experience is essential. IT should look to leverage tools that deliver full-stack observability into the logs, metrics, and tracing data that underpin reliability and resiliency metrics to ultimately optimize environments.

IT professionals must keep business leaders realistic about what technology implementations make the most sense for their organization. According to a recent report from Forrester, 55 percent of companies have not yet achieved tangible business outcomes from AI, and 43 percent say it's too soon to tell. AI and ML might not be a top priority today, but by focusing on optimizing cloud and hybrid IT environments right now, IT professionals can build the foundation for AI and ML while meeting the current needs of the business.

In 2018, IT professionals should balance optimizing the digital experience for end-users in hybrid IT environments with strategic decisions around which technologies their organization should invest in for business value beyond IT.

Leon Adato is a Head Geek at SolarWinds
Share this

The Latest

December 07, 2023

Part 4 covers OpenTelemetry: Next year, we're going to see more embrace of OpenTelemetry across the entire industry — opening up the future of instrumentation ...

December 06, 2023

Part 3 covers even more on Observability: Observability will move up the organization to support the sustainability and FinOps drive. The combined pressure of needing to adopt more sustainable practices and tackle rising cloud costs will catapult observability from an IT priority to a business requirement in 2024 ...

December 05, 2023

Part 2 covers more on Observability: In 2024, observability platforms will embrace and innovate with new technologies like GenAI for real-time analytics, becoming the fulcrum for digital experience management ...

December 04, 2023

The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, covering IT performance topics. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, Observability, AIOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 1 covers APM and Observability ...

November 30, 2023

To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...

November 29, 2023
The past few years have presented numerous challenges for businesses: a pandemic, rising interest rates, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical conflict that sent shockwaves across the global economy. But change may finally be on the horizon. According to a recent report by Endava ... a majority of executives confirmed they are feeling optimistic about the current business climate, and as a result, are forecasting larger IT budgets, increased technology funding and rollout, and prioritized innovation in the coming year ...
November 28, 2023

Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...

November 27, 2023

Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...

November 22, 2023

Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...

November 21, 2023

Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...