devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: John Gentry

  • Challenging Cloud Migration Myths in the Wake of COVID-19

    Challenging Cloud Migration Myths in the Wake of COVID-19

    The COVID-19 push to cloud migration, unfortunately, is riddled with myths. Here are some worth busting

    With a substantial increase in the number of businesses now operating from their employees’ homes, and organization leaders realizing that their office buildings are now somewhat unnecessary until a vaccination against the coronavirus is widely distributed, the cloud has played an increasingly important role in IT operations.

    For many, migrating to the cloud has had to happen quickly and at a large scale to cope with the increased pressure on IT infrastructure during the pandemic. At such a turbulent and challenging time, it’s never been more important for businesses to ensure they have the correct IT infrastructure in place.

    As more businesses of different shapes and sizes begin to use cloud computing technology, the realization that greater flexibility, efficiency and scalability can be achieved is being understood by the majority. However, there are still a significant number of enterprises that have misconceptions about how cloud technology can enhance or replace their current IT environment. The outsourcing of IT infrastructure to a dedicated provider can make it difficult for organizations to understand where and how their operations are running and can become a breeding ground for misunderstanding and myths.

    To help clear up some of these myths, I’ve put together a guide to support organizations in the decision-making process and help them understand whether moving to the cloud is the right option for their business.

    Myth 1: Companies should hold tight and do nothing in the wake of COVID-19 as moving IT operations to the cloud is too risky

    This is absolutely not true. While it might seem scary to overhaul IT operations at such an uncertain time and invest in cloud computing technology, there is no doubt that it will be worth it in the long run. Business leaders and IT directors are understandably apprehensive about buying into a cloud migration platform when their budgets are already strapped and the future of their business is uncertain, however, our own research has proven migrating to the cloud can have significant financial benefits.

    Our recent Forrester Consulting TEI (Total Economic Impact) study examined the potential return on investment enterprises may realize by deploying hybrid infrastructure optimization solutions for both the public and private cloud platforms, and found those that have already deployed a cloud migration service have seen a 145% return on investment across a three-year period. Businesses shouldn’t fear that moving into the cloud will have a negative impact to their company economics even though things are difficult in a post-COVID environment, as in fact, deploying a cloud migration strategy will have the opposite result.

    Our Current State of Hybrid Cloud and IT report found that companies that decided to halt their cloud migration altogether as a result of the pandemic are 2.5 times more likely to experience detrimental outages that can hurt company KPIs, as opposed to those that have continued their journey to the cloud over the last four months.

    Myth 2: Cloud migration has to be a quick, ‘one and done’ process if organizations are to cope with the infrastructure demands that remote working practices create

    The term “one and done” cannot be applied when migrating to the cloud. The fact is that cloud migration is a process, and being able to scale up accordingly first requires the right technologies in place. While the pandemic has exacerbated some significant IT challenges across businesses, it has placed a greater focus on ensuring employees can effectively work from home instead of a faster migration to the cloud, which has, understandably, been put on the backburner. For some organizations, remote working has never been part of their practices, but with government guidelines and lockdown restrictions, working side by side has not been an effective way to continue to keep employees safe.

    The immediacy of the shift to remote working has meant ensuring operations could continue as a priority focus for businesses. But as we begin to settle into the “new normal” and most employees are now accustomed to working from their home, vision can be turned to a digital transformation process and ensuring the correct technologies are in place for companies to thrive.

    Myth 3: Halting your cloud migration during COVID-19 will save you time and money and won’t impact your IT systems’ performance

    This is in fact an untrue statement, as businesses that have halted their cloud migration journey because of the pandemic have already experienced significant issues in their IT systems. Our report, which was conducted to better understand how businesses were coping with their migration strategies during the pandemic, has revealed that more than three-quarters (77%) of respondents have reported a lack of access to the correct tools. In addition, 81% of those surveyed have said they have spent more time working across multiple systems to create a single report on IT bandwidth and resources, increasing the amount of time spent on a singular task.

    There is no doubt that deciding to halt a cloud migration strategy because of the pandemic will have impacted organizations’ information technology systems. But that’s not to say it’s too late. Businesses can get back on track and ensure the move to the cloud is just as effective in post-COVID operations.

    Myth 4: COVID-19 has made system transparency and measuring performance more complicated than ever before, especially when factoring in cloud migration

    Measuring performance and system transparency post-COVID can only seem complicated if the appropriate resources aren’t put in place. If businesses and IT decision-makers ensure the correct technologies are readily available and accessible, measuring the performance of a cloud migration strategy should be relatively simple.

    Our survey reveals that access to the correct tools and support services has a direct correlation to business cloud performance. More than three-quarters of those who experienced performance issues during the beginning of the pandemic also say they lack sufficient access to tools. However, companies that had already begun (or actually completed) their migration process at the onset of global lockdowns experienced fewer IT outages. In fact, for more than half of businesses, having impacted access to the correct support services has created a significant hurdle to overcome at a time when they’re already trying to cope with a number of challenges. Comparing this to those that maintained good performance, just under half said access to either type was not an issue.

    As with most things at the moment, apprehension in investment is unsurprising. For businesses, attempting to get sales, productivity and efficiency back on track is the most critical post-COVID action. But, beginning to understand how a digital transformation and cloud migration strategy should be adopted or continue at this time is crucial for survival.

  • Blame Replaces Strategy: Enterprise IT War Rooms Causing Incalculable Losses

    Blame Replaces Strategy: Enterprise IT War Rooms Causing Incalculable Losses

    The concept of a “war room” is time-honored. One of the early examples is the Churchill War Rooms, an underground bunker that allowed Britain’s leaders to plot the allied route to victory during World War II. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as plain-speaking and self-assured as ever, said, “This is the room from which I will direct the war.” 

    Today, the war room concept also serves the world of business—specifically, organizations’ IT departments when troubleshooting a major issue impacting the business applications and their supporting IT infrastructure. The problem? So many parts of the infrastructure, whether hardware or software, can be implicated as the root cause of any problem. As a result, IT war rooms can encompass many stakeholders who are experts in those individual parts. And, while the goal is to collaborate to resolve the problem and minimize the damages from it, IT war rooms often result in a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, all speaking different “languages.”

    War rooms are a symptom of a much bigger problem within the IT organization. At the highest level, it results when IT operations teams have insufficient visibility and have limited proactive control of the infrastructure. For one thing, in a siloed organization (which most enterprises are), discussion across silos is rare. Plus, siloed monitoring tools for resolving infrastructure issues lack a common context and have no inherent understanding of the business impact of the applications. By contrast, the hardware, software and data that span silos do “talk.” In a sense, they collaborate. That’s the nature of connected infrastructure. Data, for example, flows throughout the enterprise, altogether oblivious of silos.

    The lofty view of war rooms, in the words of Dennis Drogseth, vice president at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates, is this: “Our war rooms can be either physical or virtual. Highly automated or not. Made up of consistent, well-defined teams, or not. But what makes them war rooms is the need for collaborative decision-making across silos.”

    How Low Can IT War Rooms Go?

    The reality is that, despite their noble charters, IT war rooms have devolved into blamestorming—rancorous debate and finger-pointing to indict application development, database analysts, IT operations or DevOps for a failure. Drogseth described a bleary view of war rooms as “disastrous assemblages of finger-pointing adults caught up with siloed versions of the truth.” In an even more disillusioning example, one vendor stated that “mean time to innocence” becomes the IT war room’s chief metric”—rather than isolating and resolving the root causes of issues.

    With so many factors in play, dollar costs of IT war rooms are difficult to calculate. Taking aim at the problem, Enterprise Management Associates said, “The average War Room comprises 15 people and takes 5-6 hours to respond to and resolve the incident that caused it to convene. 29% of War Rooms take more than 11 hours to respond and resolve.” And those figures are over and above the substantial losses that occur if a server or switch, for example, goes down and war room staffers bicker over who’s to blame. Revenue losses can easily reach into the millions of dollars per hour of outage.

    Furthermore, the problems and costs are growing. Infrastructure complexity has ballooned with the growth of hybrid data centers. The hybrid model uses cost-effective, flexible compute and storage via the cloud, while retaining the control and security provided by on-premises infrastructure. However, the reality is that highly virtualized, multi-cloud environments are amazingly complex and problematical when it comes to ensuring application service delivery. Out-of-control infrastructure leads to outages and slowdowns—and finger-pointing.

    Remedies

    There are, however, several ways to mitigate the downsides of IT war rooms:

    • Discover technology solutions that provide cross-domain insights. Stated more simply, that means finding tools that can trace infrastructure issues to their source—exactly where the issue originates—even if the symptoms appear elsewhere in the infrastructure. Achieving this level of sophistication effectively eliminates finger-pointing.
    • Learn from history. Issues repeat themselves; if an issue occurs but is not traced to its source and remedied the first time, it will almost certainly recur. Often, it requires analytics-based tools to make the necessary correlations and remedy an issue.
    • Create what EMA calls an “informed context.” An informed context can help resolve an issue, moving from triage and diagnostics, to remediation, to validation. Knowing where applications live on the infrastructure at any given time and the business priority or tier of each application is one example of “informed context.”

    IT will likely always have its war rooms, and many organizations will claim that they’re necessary. At its best, a war room is a highly motivated, solutions-driven SWAT team. Of course, SWAT teams, like anything to be valued, will forever come at a cost to the enterprise.  One way to view the IT war room is that it’s just one more cost center. Maybe the better way to view it is by quantifying its value: If a war room saves minutes in getting a server up and running after an outage—or prevents an outage altogether—the savings could run in the millions of dollars. But too often, the opposite is the case: IT war rooms further contribute to the lost revenue from a failure.

    Let’s hope that enterprises remember the original intent of IT war rooms and reorient them around strategy rather than blame. If not, enterprises might want to consider closing the door of the IT war room for good.

    — John Gentry