When I think about the word "hybrid," the first thing that pops into my mind is hybrid cloud models, which are de-facto in many organizations. But what I've come to see over this past year is that hybrid isn't just about the technology, hybrid models are taking over our daily lives.
I witnessed first-hand how it took years of learning and adjusting to determine how to do hybrid cloud right, in order to optimize a company's technology investments. And in the end, we as an industry have realized that there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to cloud vs on-prem with your technology strategy. The need for flexibility and accessibility moved organizations towards the hybrid model: a way to get the best of both worlds while meeting the unique needs of the company and its business.
Today's new normal is vacillating across a spectrum of hybrid models, too. The 2020 pandemic forced all of us to shift our work and home lives, and quickly. For example, at work, teams are trying to manage a hybrid of remote workers and in-office workers, while schools and parents are trying to manage remote and in-person learning.
Unlike major tech shifts which have sometimes taken years to be realized, this new model has been an overnight jolt to our systems. And it's been anything but smooth. In fact, for most of us, it's broken. Very broken.
You hear about kids who are unable to join their classes online due to lack of access to WiFi or laptops, or teachers who are running on fumes trying to design education plans that cover both in-person or online learning simultaneously. In the workforce, you're seeing droves of parents — mostly women — leaving their jobs to manage their families through this pandemic.
We don't have a decade to figure out the new hybrid world, but I have faith that together we'll work it out because we've seen the silver lining of finding the best of both worlds through hybrid models.
Capitalizing on the best of both remote and in-person work/school will be determined by tailoring the benefits to your company's or family's needs. Organizations and individuals are on a fast path to finding their hybrid: At work, how are we re-envisioning our schedules, the level of flexibility, and even the physical design of our workspaces? Each team and perhaps type of role will have different needs but will optimize to find their best mode of balance. At school, how can curriculum for various subjects be optimized to take advantage of the best of remote learning practices and experiences?
One thing is certain: Flexibility and adaptability are key, as both benefits and requirements to developing the hybrid model that enables you to thrive. Those attitudes will future-proof our new normal now, and in the event other crises come to jolt the system, we'll be ready with a best of both worlds hybrid solution.
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 ...
