DevOps is the key to reducing IT downtime
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Source – theaustralian.com.au
Despite having the best teams in place, a misalignment with new technologies and customer requirements can be fatal for an organisation, and IT teams are left picking up the pieces when downtime results in unhappy users. The rise in access to information and services, as customers continue to engage online, presents both a risk and a growth opportunity for organisations. In delivering an agile environment, IT departments and supporting infrastructure often come under pressure.
A recent report found that businesses are losing $700 billion a year to IT downtime globally. Unexpected network or application failures have a direct and far reaching impact on an organisations bottom line and ongoing business operations. In some extreme cases, data and monetary losses from unforeseen outages can even result in an organisation’s demise. For example, one time mobile market leader BlackBerry suffered a four day outage in 2011 impacting 70 million BlackBerry users globally. This has been a contributing factor towards the company’s dwindling market share with the outage resulting in a 16% decline.
To reduce the occurrences of IT downtime and its impact, organisations will need to invest in on-demand solutions to keep up with increasing customer demands, while keeping security and convenience at the heart of their approach. Adoption of a streamlined DevOps strategy will enable organisations to avoid downtime by responding faster to shifting business needs.
Can your app be hosted in two places at once?
The cloud has intrinsically changed the way businesses and customers engage with each other. IT teams need to be thinking about how these advancements are impacting their users, rather than the technologies themselves. The impact of cloud outages, for example has an irreparable impact on user perceptions.
Application architects and IT managers with expertise in user-experience are revolutionising the way services and applications are delivered to end-users. Breaking up monolithic pieces of software like applications, putting some parts in the public and others in the private cloud can improve speed of delivery and security protocols, in a cost-effective way.
By breaking apart an application, businesses can make better decisions about the parts that need to be fast and efficient, and the ones that need to be more secure. This will ultimately affect their decision about where each part of the applications will be hosted.
DevOps driving efficiency and speed
IT teams often struggle with turning big business goals into projects and processes, like the development and deployment of applications. F5’s State of Application Delivery Report 2017 shows that the majority of organisations still don’t see DevOps as having a strategic impact on the level of importance placed on a programmable infrastructure.
However, we all agree that reducing downtime while cutting costs is key for any business, therefore driving innovation by bringing on a DevOps team needs to be a core focus for any organisation.
As organisational priorities change and the push for new functions to meet customer requirements heightens, IT teams need to deploy apps that let them meet these requirements. To make this possible, DevOps teams are designed to enact cultural and technological changes within organisations, and are typically built around the sole aim of reacting faster and more effectively to changing business demands.
Organisations cannot afford IT downtime. Instead, they must ensure that a stable foundation for DevOps is created, and that their goals are aligned with IT departments in order to get the job done quickly and efficiently while minimising the risk of failures. Downtime is no longer just an IT issue, it’s a customer service and brand reputation one. Investing in the expertise and software to reduce the chance of downtime in today’s app-centric, cloud based environment will be money well spent.