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the enterprise service delivery infrastructure , the applications that utilise it and all their respective interdependencies becomes a mission-critical business activity .
As the business environment continues to evolve and competition increases , there is renewed pressure on IT to reap the benefits of external cloud services , but there is rarely a plan to assure performance and secure the data stored in the cloud , beyond relying on the cloud providers . While cloud providers advertise they have integrated orchestration , management , and security of respective cloud offerings , a better approach would be trust but verify .
Furthermore , cloud management solutions only monitor operational and performance metrics of cloud resources and applications .
Cloud management does not analyse the interdependencies across services stack such as network , compute , storage , databases , service enablers and applications . Last but not least , cloud management does not monitor holistically hybrid cloud and multi-vendor cloud environments . Therefore if an organisation becomes dependent on the cloud to support key aspects of the business then the CIO needs an alternative approach to achieve complete visibility across all hybrid cloud based systems .
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‘ Cloud will play a central role in the DX transformation of the large majority – if not all – of enterprises over the next decade .’ |
Without a window into this entire ‘ hybrid environment ’, enterprises lose sight of service vulnerabilities . Point visibility into disparate domains from a variety of multi-vendor silo-specific tools lacks a holistic end-to-end view of the service delivery infrastructure and obscures the insight into interrelationships of its components and dependencies on other infrastructure domains . Criminal activities , such as hacking and Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attacks and advanced persistent threats ( APT ), can go unnoticed . With so much of modern business activity reliant on the effective operation of the network , this state of affairs is unacceptable , and quite simply will impede the achievement of business objectives .
A solution in plain sight
The right approach to service assurance overcomes this challenge by providing a holistic visibility across the entire service delivery infrastructure from the wireless edge to the core to the data centre and in the cloud . Organisations must gain insight into existing service performance baselines and migrate applications , compute , network , and storage workloads to the hybrid cloud with confidence by quickly detecting and resolving service issues without modifying their existing workflows . In this way , enterprises will be able to maintain quality ,
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speed and business agility and assure high levels of availability , reliability , and responsiveness of their digital services .
This is achieved by continuous end-to-end monitoring and analysis of the traffic and application data flowing over hybrid cloud environments . The analysis of the monitored data provides end-to-end servicelevel visibility in hybrid cloud environments that simplify the complexity , mitigate risks , accelerate business agility and promote operational excellence . Translating real-time smart data into actionable insights is of huge strategic value to the enterprise both in terms of productivity and revenue .
Cloud will play a central role in the DX transformation of the large majority – if not all – of enterprises over the next decade . An organisation ’ s commitment to implementing cloud solutions can be on a large scale , covering many aspects of the IT estate to facilitate critical operational functions . This will include everything from SaaS based solutions to support ERP and CRM , to lines of businesses ( LOBs ) utilising third party cloud based services , regularly introducing new applications to the mix . The CIO needs to be able to confidently manage the quality of each new cloud service and application that is adopted across the business . Every new system must be accounted for and be aligned with the overall DX cloud initiative and enterprise-wide DX strategy .
With the challenge of digital transformation comes a risk , and that risk for the enterprise is failure , and ultimately going out of business . However , with a proper , robust service assurance strategy , adopting cloud technology alongside legacy hardware and applications to create a hybrid environment – one that will be in use for the foreseeable future – the benefits of what is to come will far outweigh any risk associated with it . When this is realised , impossible will not be a word for the enterprise , and they will enter a new and truly digital era , having navigated the stormy seas of digital transformation .
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24 | May 2017 |