The Growing Case for Observability as Enterprise Cloud Strategies Become More Nuanced and Complex
Cloud computing has enabled digital transformation to take place with ease across businesses. Users and devices are increasing as online service offerings become cost-effective, efficient, and easily accessible. Complicated workflows and sophisticated customer offerings are being migrated to the cloud at accelerated rates of deployment and delivery.
However, at the same time, the enterprise cloud scenario is becoming extremely complex – posing risks to enterprises in terms of performance and workflow disruption. This necessitates businesses to be in control of their cloud strategies and keep observability at the core of their initiatives.
How Is Enterprise Cloud Scenario Becoming Complex?
Multiple CSPs
Enterprises are choosing multiple cloud vendors to fulfill their cloud requirements. Surveys show that about 80% of businesses make use of two or more IaaS or PaaS providers. This means the offerings of multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) are being used for different applications and workloads within the same organization. This adds complexity as it requires a different set of skills and expertise to manage multiple CSPs.
Hybrid Cloud
Large enterprises often employ a combination of on-premise and cloud for their digital transformation. Maintaining and continuously ensuring seamless integration between the on-premise and cloud applications and data centers is a technically challenging task.
Complex Cloud Management
As more and more sophisticated cloud service offerings are being used by enterprises, the management of the cloud architecture itself is becoming intricate and complex. This has led to an increase in management tools required to run, maintain, and configure cloud operations. Choosing which tools are necessary and how they can be effectively used to manage and monitor cloud environments has become challenging.
Skill Sets
Management of complicated cloud configurations, different CSPs, and hybrid architectures requires specialized skill sets. This entails onboarding personnel with the desired experience and high levels of competencies. The cost of acquisition, as well as retention of such resources, is complex and expensive.
Data Security, Compliances, and Protocols
With the explosion of data storage in the cloud, privacy, compliances, regulatory protocols, and data security requirements are becoming more stringent. This increases the complexity of enterprise cloud computing. Organizations must ensure that their cloud environments meet various compliance standards and adhere to strict security protocols to protect sensitive data.
Costs
With every service offering, there is an associated cost. Cost control and optimization become complex and cumbersome. Complex ongoing monitoring and management of the cloud environment are required to ensure that overspending on cloud resources is not taking place, along with whether the most cost-effective option has been chosen.
Complexities Cause Chaos
With the increase in complexity comes mismanagement of cloud infrastructure and application performance. This mismanagement can be the beginning of an all-out failure of the cloud infrastructure of an ongoing business, resulting in huge financial and reputational losses.
Downtime and Troubleshooting Delay
Mismanaged cloud infrastructure can result in the downtime and non-availability of services offered by an enterprise, resulting in a loss in revenue and productivity. Since the systems are large and complex, coupled with inadequate monitoring and maintenance, it makes troubleshooting issues and resolution of problems difficult and slow.
Escalating Costs
All cloud services are a ‘pay as you go’ model. Easy to upgrade but if not maintained, the cost will escalate exponentially due to inefficiencies caused due to the overprovisioning or non-utilization of resources.
Lethargy in Agility
If cloud infrastructure is not maintained correctly due to complexity, an enterprise’s agility factor is downgraded. The ability to respond to changing business needs, along with the ability to scale up, gets hampered, thus reducing the agility and competitiveness of the enterprise.
Data Security Vulnerabilities and Breaches
With a complex but not well-maintained cloud infrastructure, there is a very high chance of increased security vulnerabilities, thus also increasing the risk of data breaches and other security incidents. A while ago, IDC found out that 80% of the organizations that experienced a cloud data breach in 2019-2020 held security misconfigurations responsible for the same.
Failures in Compliance
Complex cloud infrastructure could lead to compliances and regulations being broken, resulting in fines and damage to the enterprise’s reputation.
Lack of Visibility
Without proper cloud management, it can become difficult to gain visibility into cloud resource utilization, usage patterns, and cost data, making it challenging to optimize the cloud environment and reduce costs.
Observability, the Taming of Complexities of Cloud Management
Complete Visibility
Observability gives a complete and comprehensive view of the system as a whole. Simply put, it provides a unified view of the state of all operations in the cloud using logs, metrics generated by Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and traces. This unified view gives teams a complete picture of the state and behavior of the cloud environment.
Improved Troubleshooting
With access to complete information on the state of the cloud and all its dependent components, performance, and behavioral patterns, teams can improve diagnosis and resolution capabilities. They can quickly identify and isolate problems, reducing the risk of service disruptions and improving overall reliability and performance.
System Inter-relationships
The cloud hosts several applications, databases, services, and other components. How these different components interact with each other and the relationships between different systems and services are easily mapped out using observability. This allows the IT teams to detect and mitigate issues quickly.
AIOps
Observability combined with AIOps, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, can now detect and alert teams to anomalies in patterns of system behavior. This enables them to automatically take proactive measures to prevent problems before they become critical.
AIOps, Observability, and Cloud Management
AIOps uses observability data to automate the detection and mitigation of operational issues occurring within the cloud. This helps resolve issues quickly, reduce downtime, and improve the system’s performance.
Using already generated data by the observability system, AI and ML can quickly learn to predict and prevent outages and issues before they occur. This reduces the risk of service disruptions and helps organizations maintain high performance, reliability, and availability levels. Also, AIOps can use observability data to perform root cause analysis and identify the underlying cause of issues more quickly and accurately.
Favorably, AIOps offers the advantage of intelligent automation of management tasks that are routine and repetitive. This increases efficiency, reduces errors caused due to manual intervention, and frees up IT resources for more critical tasks.
Observability – The Solution for Managing Complexities
In summary, the growing complexity of enterprise cloud strategies due to multiple CSPs, hybrid cloud, complex cloud management, and stringent data security regulations is causing chaos in terms of mismanagement, downtime, escalating costs, and security breaches.
To overcome these challenges, observability has emerged as a solution. Observability provides complete visibility into the cloud environment, improved troubleshooting, understanding of system inter-relationships, and better cloud management through AIOps.
By providing a holistic and unified view of the cloud environment, observability enables teams to detect and resolve issues quickly, reduce downtime, and improve the performance of the system as a whole.
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