The acceleration towards the cloud

As businesses implemented innovation projects at break-neck speed during the global pandemic to maintain business continuity, cloud computing initiatives over the past year have been dramatically accelerated like never before.

Proving its worth once and for all, cloud computing has provided businesses with speed, agility, and resilience amidst an extremely challenging landscape. From running only a handful of applications in the cloud, to shifting entire IT estates over as fast as they can, the potential of the cloud has resulted in a new level of trust and appreciation.

With the main focus to regain growth, cloud has emerged as the core foundation of enterprises in their business models, resulting in cloud services spending in the APAC region to grow over 38%, $36.4 billion, in 2020, and forecasted to reach US$ 48.4 Billion by 2021 according to IDC.

Indeed, the pandemic has been a catalyst in the transition to cloud computing. As organizations rushed through digital transformation projects to deliver new digital services to both internal and external stakeholders, most relied heavily on the cloud for speed and scale.

Monitoring and managing cloud complexity

Compared to the agility of the cloud, legacy technologies would never have been able to support the level and speed of innovation which has been achieved. However, adoption and increased integration of cloud has greatly impacted the IT department, where it now contends with huge complexity and even greater pressure.

In our latest Agents of Transformation report, Agents of Transformation 2021: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability, we found that 86% of technologists in Singapore are experiencing greater levels of complexity as a result of the acceleration of cloud computing initiatives during the pandemic.

After rapidly implementing new IT systems over the last year, technologists have put more emphasis on monitoring the entire IT estate, from customer-facing applications and external vendors to back-end infrastructures. But while their traditional monitoring tools have provided them with visibility across legacy environments, new hybrid cloud environments naturally demand new solutions.  

When changes occur in real-time within a software-defined, cloud environment, monitoring is far more difficult. 78% of technologists have already cited that technology sprawl and the need to manage a patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies are additional sources of complexity.

Cloud is booming, but so is cloud waste. While 88% of technologists claimed that their response to the pandemic has created more IT complexity than ever experienced, as cloud computing continues to grow, and cloud users mature, a greater emphasis must be placed on monitoring solutions to ensure visibility on stack health and ensure that there are no idle resources or wasted cloud spend on overprovisioned infrastructure.

With legacy infrastructure being mostly physical, technologists previously knew that they were dealing with constants. Be it five servers or ten network wires, fixed dashboards were enough for each layer of the IT stack.

However, as organizations and businesses scale up and adopt more systems for flexibility, the level of complexity rises in tandem as their business needs fluctuate. For instance, a company depending on three servers to support a customer-facing application, may suddenly increase capacity to twenty servers to meet a demand surge in real-time, before reducing down to five a few hours later, all while adapting its network and storage infrastructure at the same time.

Traditional monitoring solutions are not effective for such dynamic changes, hindering most technologists from getting visibility of their full IT stack health. In fact, 78% of technologists are being held back due to multiple, disconnected monitoring solutions, and critically, 80% stress that quickly cutting through noise to identify root causes of performance issues will continue to be a significant challenge.

The key to achieving cloud success - full-stack observability

Looking ahead, technologists know that the transition to cloud is only going to get faster as organizations continue to prioritize digitalisation and exploit new opportunities beyond the pandemic.

Technologists also acknowledge that unless they have access to greater visibility and insight into all their IT environments, they cannot drive the rapid and sustainable digital transformation their organizations need. Indeed, 82% of technologists believe that their organization needs to connect full-stack observability to business outcomes within 12 months in order to remain competitive and achieve innovation goals.

Only with genuine full-stack observability, will IT teams be able to quickly identify and resolve any issues before they impact end users and the business.

It is imperative that IT and business leaders start to address this issue now, or risk jeopardizing all of their efforts and investments thus far. Organizations can develop the most innovative, cloud-based applications, but if their teams do not have the visibility and tools to optimize performance in real-time, they will never be able to create and maintain optimal digital experiences.

Being able to monitor all technical areas across their IT stack, including within cloud environments, will enable technologists to directly link technology performance to end user experience and business outcomes. This will eventually allow them to prioritize actions and focus on what really matters to the business. To fully enjoy the benefits that cloud promises, organizations must get this right.