When it comes to digital transformation, a huge gap exists for IT leaders who are under immense pressure to deliver SLAs securely, in record time and under budget. One of the toughest challenges IT leaders face in delivering on digital transformation is measuring success. Digital transformation is also highly complex. In fact, the average organization manages hundreds of applications across data centers, multiple clouds and the edge, and over 20 other app security and delivery technologies. (Business Chief, April 2022)
Full Stack Observability is a technology paradigm that helps you measure digital transformation. You can achieve FSO simply by:
- Enabling the telemetry data across your entire IT footprint—from applications to storage
- Enabling contextual-based analytics with aggregated telemetry data
- Generating essential analytics that you can use to drive informed actions
So how and where can you leverage Full Stack Observability to meet your digital transformation goals?
Four Areas Where Full Stack Observability Can Help Your Business
1. ASSURING A SUCCESSFUL CLOUD MIGRATION
You’ve probably already migrated some workloads to the cloud, so you know the process can be daunting. It can take an incredibly long time, especially if you’re part of a legacy company where the applications you need to migrate have been in the data center for more than 20 years. There’s also a big unknown in migration: you may have asked, “What happens if I move my applications to the cloud?”
Full Stack Observability helps you answer fundamental questions, such as “What’s connected?” and “How will moving those applications and connections impact my clients, buyers and suppliers?” Answers to these questions will become instrumental in planning your strategy for what gets mapped and ultimately moved—and in what order.
2. RUN PRE- AND POST-VALIDATION TO FULLY UNDERSTAND EXPECTED RESULTS
Pre- and post-validation is another area where you can benefit from full stack observability.
You can start by asking what improvements you’d like to make. You’ll want to consider performance across your entire IT environment. A standard “lift and shift” may not be enough when moving your monolithic, on-premise legacy apps to the cloud. It’s typical to miss out on many of the cloud’s performance improvements.
By performing a proof of concept (POC), you’ll generate real before-and-after metrics you can use to evaluate whether or not to migrate specific workloads to the cloud. During this stage, you’ll see relationships between applications and systems. For instance, if one application only taps into a particular system every 30 or 60 days, you’ll want to be sure you’re giving your POC enough time to evaluate the entire cycle.
Your results may surprise you. You may find that your workloads do not perform as well in the cloud due to unexpected latency that keeps you from fulfilling your on-premise SLAs. Full stack observability will help you recognize all of that—and this data is critical in adapting your organization’s workloads for optimal performance.
3. MANAGING & OPTIMIZING CLOUD COSTS SO YOU CAN CONTROL SPENDING
Approximately 30% of enterprises reported their cloud spending as wasted. And 80% of enterprises surveyed considered managing their cloud spending a challenge. (McKinsey, 2020). That’s because cloud spending can be tough to track.
If you find yourself in a position of out-of-control cloud spend, full stack observability can help. Think of the cloud as you would any rental you forget to return. (ie: a Redbox disc or a library book.) If you don’t return the item, incremental charges pile on daily. It’s the same with the cloud. Once you turn on a resource that isn’t properly planned or tracked, the cloud bill escalates with your untracked accrued charges. For optimal savings, you’ll want to rightsize the apps you decide to move to the cloud to avoid overpaying for unused space and performance.
For instance, if you have an on-premise server that’s used only 25% of the time, you may decide to provision that server over to the cloud using one-fourth of the capacity—but you may still end up paying more in the cloud. Tracking your costs through full stack observability will give you the end-to-end visibility you need to streamline and save.
4. DELIVER DIFFERENTIATED USER EXPERIENCE
When you move your workloads to the cloud, you’ll want to gauge how your decisions about the cloud will impact your end users. Consider a typical regional bank with 35 locations across a state. Full stack observability can be used to measure the application’s performance if they’re having application problems. The bank would first need to create a synthetic measurement tool to simulate what the user is doing. It can be based on measurements such as: How the user logs into the system and how long it takes to perform the desired task. Does it take 10 seconds? 20 seconds or longer? Next, the bank would create policies and templates to alert its IT department if the app exceeds its values. This can happen to one user or the whole branch. Having these data points and insights will help the IT leaders at the bank pinpoint and improve the end-user experience before any trouble occurs.
The Benefits of Third-Party Expertise Stack Up
The benefit of having digital service experts handle these critical steps can be significant. A team of digital transformation experts will have experience working with thousands of clients in all industry sectors. They will guide you to ask the right questions and test the right dependencies to arrive at answers more quickly and ensure a faster, more efficient migration process.
They will also recommend working across your organization, including all necessary functions impacted by your migration. Within the full stack, there is an application layer, which is controlled by the application team. The database team controls a database layer, and an infrastructure team controls the infrastructure team—all should be involved.
Third-party experts will also help manage your whole process, including inventory, application dependency mapping, migration and more—freeing your team to focus on the initiatives that matter most to your business.
Presidio and Cisco’s Full Stack Observability is Vital to Your Success
Presidio works with its strategic partner Cisco to extend visibility across your organization’s application stack, including compute, storage, network and AWS cloud. Increased visibility within a cloud environment gives you a detailed view of all activity and helps optimize costs and application performance while minimizing security threats. (TechTarget)
With full stack observability, you’ll be able to collect data points from every aspect of your IT data structure. You can then use that data to generate insights and give solid recommendations that empower your organization and energize your business.
See how Presidio & Cisco can help bring clarity to your apps.
