“Sustainability” in the corporate world often defies easy definition, particularly when applied to the delicate balance between social and environmental responsibility and economic growth.
CB Bhattacharya is Chair in Sustainability and Ethics at the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, and the author of Small Actions, Big Difference: Leveraging Corporate Sustainability to Drive Business and Societal Value. He’s a highly regarded expert in strategy innovation designed to increase business and social value. Writing for McKinsey Quarterly, Bhattacharya notes that many business leaders today are taking actions to reinforce, in his words, “sustainability efforts that benefit not only people and planet but also profit.”
A worthy goal, certainly, but many leaders may ponder how sustainable business practices might impact their company’s day-to-day operations. How, for instance, could a sharpened focus on “planet and profit” bolster the bottom line?
Before we explore further, let’s define “sustainability” in a business context. One company-focused perspective, The Four Pillars, subdivides corporate sustainability into four key areas:
- Human. Promoting business values that maintain and enhance human capital (e.g., investments in health and education).
- Social. Investment in and creating services that help foster human rights and equality.
- Economic. Using business assets efficiently to maintain and grow company profitability.
- Environmental. Minimizing impact on the environment through energy conservation and innovation projects. These may include workplace eco-initiatives such as carbon drawdown solutions, employee volunteer and awareness campaigns, and remote work to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For our purposes, let’s discuss #3 — how companies can achieve economic sustainability through AppDynamics.
Digital transformation and sustainability with cloud migration and full-stack observability
Cost reduction is a key advantage of cloud migration, as traditional on-prem applications tend to overprovision to cope with peak demand. Indeed, a key goal of any cloud-migration journey is to deliver an optimal user experience without overspending. This can be challenging when application workloads and throughputs are unknown.
AppDynamics, an essential component of the Cisco full-stack observability solution, can play a significant role in your company’s digital transformation and sustainability effort by helping to right-size your target cloud infrastructure.
How so? Take this Amazon Web Services (AWS) example: Before cloud migration, AppDynamics infrastructure visibility tools work to baseline application workloads and throughput. During migration, AppDynamics collects key performance indicators (KPIs) such as resource utilization, delivered experience and throughput to assist with initial sizing and adjustments of the required AWS infrastructure.
AppDynamics provides post-migration business sustainability, too
The growing mix of traditional on-prem infrastructure, multi-cloud environments and microservices makes it difficult for IT operations teams to manage these highly distributed topologies and dependencies. This complex, hybrid environment can have negative consequences, resulting in a wasteful overprovisioning of resources. Skyrocketing costs can prevent your organization from reaping the full benefits of digital transformation efforts.
In addition to optimizing cloud migrations, AppDynamics helps ensure economic sustainability once your cloud environment is established. It utilizes full-stack observability combined with a real-time decision engine to optimize performance of a heterogeneous mix of applications across a labyrinthine environment.
AppDynamics supports economic sustainability efforts by providing:
- Total visibility across applications, supporting infrastructure and services.
- Comprehensive, real-time data and metrics related to transactions.
- AI-driven insights — including incident avoidance, data-driven capacity planning and what-if scenario modeling — to optimize costs and reduce risks.
AppDynamics and digital transformation sustainability: Customer examples
Cyclomedia develops, builds and operates advanced mobile mapping systems with 360° street-level detail for urban areas of Western Europe and North America. By deploying AppDynamics to its backend services, the company was able to detect service interruptions or potential issues before they threatened to impact both internal users and end customers.
The benefits of AppDynamics proactive troubleshooting and service optimization included:
- Huge cost savings: AppDynamics reduced overhead, staffing and licensing costs by hundreds of thousands of Euros annually.
- Accelerated mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) through greater visibility and transparency.
- Replaced manual reporting and dashboards with automated, dynamic reports accessible across multiple teams and departments.
- Consolidated disparate monitoring and health check solutions into a single platform.
Carhartt produces millions of workwear garments and accessories at four production facilities in Kentucky and Tennessee. AppDynamics enabled it to greatly reduce costly service and application downtime, avoiding millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Over the past decade, Carhartt has undertaken a major digital transformation, replacing some on-prem, hardware-based IT systems with more flexible, agile and scalable cloud solutions. The cost of an hour of downtime anywhere in this mixed environment — on-prem or cloud — can reach into the millions of dollars in lost revenue.
AppDynamics enabled Carhartt to visualize key components of its environment and prioritize issues by business and customer impact. It also allowed the apparel maker to use its time and resources more productively, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and operating costs without sacrificing visibility, control or performance.
Sustain your profitability with AppDynamics
AppDynamics helps companies achieve their business sustainability goals by providing full-stack observability solutions to maintain and grow profitability. Go here to learn more.