By Jyoti Prakash, Regional Sales Director, India, and SAARC Countries, Splunk
In today’s world of autonomous devices, self-driving cars, and robotics, the sense-think-act paradigm is becoming increasingly relevant to complex operations. As these technologies sense, think, and act, they can complete tasks automatically, and this applies to IT operations practices as well.
Today all companies are competing in the digital economy, be it your local restaurant, grocer, or bank. With digital experiences on a rise, companies big and small need to adopt the efficiency and flexibility that the cloud offers. In reality, there can be no business strategy without a cloud strategy. Leveraging the cloud has become imperative as organizations seek to accelerate the pace of their digital transformation, grow, scale, and innovate in order to keep up with the competition.
In fact, enterprises are now moving towards best-of-breed multi-cloud environments that offer enhanced flexibility, interoperability (avoids vendor lock-in), security, and compliance. IT leaders are well-aware that multi-cloud will dominate cloud strategy in the future.
IT Modernization Requires Multi-Cloud
According to Gartner’s IT Leadership Vision 2021, multi-cloud is among the top five technology trends helping drive business goals. Multi-cloud is the practice of using services from multiple cloud service providers which offers a rich set of options to solve rigorous needs across a diverse range of computing and business functions, thereby optimizing returns on investment. When businesses embrace this architecture, it also allows them to standardize the basics—security, compliance, availability, and more.
However, despite all the advantages of a multi-cloud approach, enterprises still struggle to extract maximum value from their cloud investment. Legacy infrastructures, siloed approaches, and piecemeal data insights are just some of the challenges that businesses face in the multi-cloud world resulting in greater complexity, slower innovation, and higher costs. To succeed in the era of multi-cloud, business leaders like CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs need to start embracing cross-functional capabilities and empower their security, IT, and DevOps teams with these three imperatives.
Data Analysis at Scale from Any Source
Big data makes it difficult to proactively detect, alert and direct investigations without a layer of data abstraction that lends operational simplicity and observability. It is also critical to establish security within the systems and be able to take in any data and metadata from any source and at scale. Taking in all data — and analyzing and prioritizing it properly — eliminates blind spots in distributed ecosystems that can create security vulnerabilities and hinder investigation and resolution. With end-to-end visibility, organizations can monitor and manage threats better, simplifying and strengthening their security posture efficiently.
But this is insufficient considering how often security teams are understaffed while organizations continue to expand their digital footprints. Relying on automation and orchestration will help teams detect, investigate, and respond quickly. Using automated playbooks, they can prioritize alerts, block suspicious activities, or even address a security breach at machine speed.
Real-Time Insights
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud make full range visibility across the entire IT stack a challenge. To address this, organizations need to make their systems observable and visible across their IT ecosystem. Simply put, the more observable a system, the quicker cross-functional teams can diagnose problems.
Observability solutions leverage data across clouds and on-prem to proactively detect, alert, and direct investigations and reduce performance issues. Observability solutions use metrics, traces, and logs as data types to understand and debug distributed systems. Today, security, IT and DevOps teams are realizing that their monitoring is fundamentally broken and that old ways of monitoring and troubleshooting are unsuitable for a more complex multi-cloud landscape.
When it comes to realizing the return of the investment made towards the cloud, observability leaders outperform beginners across several application developments and reliability KPIs. According to Splunk’s State of Observability report, observability solutions are helping promote cross-functional alignment. 69% of leaders attribute improved alignment among their ITOps, developer, and security teams to their use of observability solutions, compared to 60% of beginners. In this, it is heartening to learn that Indian organizations are ahead of the curve, with only 29% rated as beginners, as against 62% globally.
Analytics Across Distributed Systems
Finally, a key decision to ensure cloud success is to free up your developers. Another valuable IT resource, with the right tools that allow the custom application, developers can mitigate issues, ensure flawless applications performance, and scale per business needs. This allows them to spend more time innovating for customers, and building solutions toward achieving the best business outcomes. As such, multi-cloud is not just a play to optimize costs and/or to increase business resilience- it also spurs experimentation through choice, flexibility, and dynamism.
This disparate, new technology landscape demands a new data fabric. A unified platform and purpose-built solutions provide this backbone. It removes barriers between data and action, and powers comprehensive data strategies for IT, DevOps, and security teams, so they can operate and innovate faster. While organizations in India are prioritizing their cloud investments, more can be done to secure the success of their multi-cloud strategy.
