The Expert View: Managing cloud complexity

The cloud has become an increased source of complexity for many businesses, said Greg Adams of Dynatrace, introducing a Business Reporter Breakfast Briefing at the Goring Hotel in London. He told attendees, all senior executives from a range of industries, that hybrid and multi-cloud strategies were creating complexities in security, data management and other operations.

 

However, companies are not keen to relinquish the benefits they gain from moving to the cloud, so they must develop strategies for managing complexity. They can often find themselves dealing with tens of thousands of alerts every few days, without sufficient staff to deal with them all. What they need is a proactive solution that will take the load for them, enabling the business to get the best out of the cloud without sacrificing efficiency.

 

Fortunately, there are new tools available that can make that task easier using artificial intelligence and automation, such as those offered by Dynatrace.

 

A cloudy outlook

 

One attendee explained the new challenge organisations face by pointing out that a complete customer journey used to be handled on one server, which was controlled by the organisation. A typical journey today might be handled by three, four or more different service providers.

 

That might be because cloud provider A is better at handling retail fulfilment, while cloud provider B does a better job with machine learning, for example. Or it could be because acquisitions and mergers have brought together companies that have established services with different cloud providers.

 

On top of this, organisations must deal with perhaps hundreds of software-as-a-service solutions that, though not necessarily cloud services, further increase the complexity of where data is processed and stored.

 

Poor visibility

 

These systems bring enormous benefits. They allow companies to be agile in launching new products and services, and scale up processes quickly to match peaks in demand. They provide a modern alternative to legacy systems, some of which may no longer be capable of supporting the latest services, and because they are constantly updated they protect the business from falling behind competitors when IT isn’t able to keep up with patching and updating in-house systems.

 

The difficulty is in achieving end-to-end visibility of this new arrangement of systems. It’s necessary so that potential problems can be identified, and data kept secure. For the financial services sector, regulators now expect businesses to show which services they rely on and demonstrate that they would be resilient in the event of an outage.

 

Regulations such as these may well be imitated in other sectors as officials look for ways to ensure that customers are not disadvantaged by avoidable IT failures. That’s a laudable aim but, as attendees at the briefing made clear, attaining visibility is harder than it sounds.

 

Changing conditions

 

The flipside of those automatic updates, for example, is that things change without warning. As one attendee noted, yesterday’s button arrangement might look different today, requiring runbooks to be updated and slowing staff down while they adjust.

 

There are tools available to help, attendees acknowledged, but they need managing, and somebody must be available to action their findings. The shortage of IT talent makes that very difficult. And even if you can find people, it can be hard to argue for extra resources when the C-suite is under the impression that migrating to the cloud should have made everything cheaper.

 

Another significant challenge is the question of exit strategies. Financial services regulations are calling on firms to have an exit strategy for their cloud services, but this isn’t always easy. The more embedded your data is with one cloud provider, the harder it can be to remove it and place it with another provider.

 

Blue-sky thinking

 

To solve these problems, good enterprise architecture is vital, attendees agreed. It also helps to have forward-thinking leadership that will plan which services the organisation will adopt, and for what purpose. Company culture matters too, particularly in discouraging people from adopting shadow IT services that further complicate the picture.

 

Several attendees said that there often needed to be a trigger to get senior executives interested in tackling cloud complexity. They said that issues with a direct impact on customers were often drivers of change and suggested that technology teams need to seize these opportunities to argue for tools to manage complexity.

 

The right tools can make a huge difference. As Adams pointed out, the second generation of observability tools merely provided a snapshot of the IT estate. The third generation, Dynatrace Observability, is helping customers by using AI and automation to generate a real-time map of the estate and can even find processes that might have been forgotten by detecting activity that hasn’t been labelled.

 

Blue-sky thinking

 

Dynatrace Observability can automatically correlate the information from dozens of platforms, applications and sources, finding dependencies and analysing behaviour. Then it can deliver actionable insights, rather than generic alerts from multiple analysis tools, and it delivers them proactively, so there is no need for a team member to go digging for issues. This helps deal with cloud complexity in a manageable and scalable way.

 

It also reduces the pressure to add more staff to manage complexity. Where there are shortages, attendees agreed that good vendor relationships can be a solution. Vendors can act as trusted advisers, not only supplying the right tools but also sharing the benefit of their experience with many other organisations. However, the automated nature of a tool such as Dynatrace reduces the need for expert advice of any kind.

 

These kinds of proactive solutions will be extremely important in the future because cloud complexity is here to stay. Not only will organisations expect IT to have a clearer view of the estate, but regulators will soon be demanding it.