Optimization and Efficiency: How to Go All In on the Cloud
Investment in and adoption of the cloud continues to thrive. It’s also set to grow further, with enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing overtaking traditional IT spend by 2025. Gartner also predicts that by 2024, nearly 60% of IT spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies, while by 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services. The cloud shift is well and truly full steam ahead.
But how can organizations ensure they can go all in on the cloud? To make the most of the cloud and reap the benefits, including optimized costs and improved efficiency, organizations need to focus on modernizing and simplifying IT operations through service ownership and automation.
Doing so will help organizations reach operational excellence and be able to do more with less, helping improve efficiency and make vital cost savings. Here’s why.
Taking Ownership
Service ownership is all about giving engineers responsibility for supporting the code that they deliver. Why does this matter? It’s not just about fixing issues; it’s about empowering them to innovate for customers because they are closest to them, so they can deliver value quickly and iterate as needed. It also means subject matter experts on a particular service or piece of code are responsible for any issues with it, rather than a separate ops team. This means that issues are resolved much faster, with less chaos and interruptions.
This helps to modernize IT operations because empowering engineers to own services minimizes hand-offs and can accelerate mean time to resolution (MTTR), while also improving the customer experience. And in the cloud, the only thing that matters is speed. Speed of innovation, and faster resolution of issues. When something breaks, the old, ticket-based method of IT operations won’t be up to the task. But service ownership provides the framework needed to achieve faster incident response and focus on building new experiences for customers.
Service owners are much better placed to investigate and remediate issues, and will instinctively know where to look. This frees up the time needed to make decisions on what to build for customers.
Switching to service ownership, however, requires significant investment of both time and resources. And an understanding that there are cultural roadblocks to solve, in addition to technical ones. This is a journey that takes time and dedication, as well as executive support.
To ensure a smooth transition and continued growth in the cloud, organizations should start by setting up a base standard of how services are built, service standards, and service mapping. Doing so sets you off on the right path to moving fast and allowing teams to focus on innovation.
Automating Processes
Process automation is another critical area for helping organizations modernize IT operations. For example, automation can be used to diagnose and remediate repetitive issues. When an incident occurs, automation can replace the manual process of diagnostic tasks like checking memory or CPU health or gathering error logs to help find the root cause faster. Simple fixes could also be applied to reduce the number of interruptions for engineers.
By automating troubleshooting, remediation, and escalation tasks, organizations can replace manual operations which are too slow for life in the cloud. As much as 85% of time spent during a typical incident is spent diagnosing the root cause.
Too much time is being wasted on manual processes for diagnosis. Automating these tasks will speed up MTTR by at least 15 minutes, and reduce interruptions by at least half. Having fewer interruptions and being able to respond faster means engineers have more time to focus on innovation.
As organizations look to reach operational excellence and become more efficient, they need to consolidate their tools to help them streamline and standardize their automation processes and workflows. Choosing a digital operations platform that helps you identify, prioritize, and resolve critical issues before customers feel the pain is imperative for digital modern enterprises looking to move fast and delight their customers.
Finally, delegating automated processes to the right people, enabling first responders to diagnose and correct common problems faster and eliminate toil reduces interruptions, saves time, and protects development teams from burnout.
The Benefits of Going All In
By focusing on service ownership and automation to modernize and simplify IT operations, organizations can reap the benefits of the cloud, helping to improve resilience, cut costs, and improve agility.
Improve Operational Resilience
Resiliency matters in the cloud native era. Customers expect services to be always-on. As such, downtime can be lethal. But the uncomfortable truth is that things break more often than we’d like to admit. Organizations cannot afford to waste time dealing with manual tasks when incidents are laying waste to customer experience.
With ownership and automation, organizations can build for resilience by reducing the time it takes to triage and diagnose the root cause of incidents.
With modern IT operations, first responders are empowered to quickly triage incidents themselves, reducing the need to escalate for help, but enabling them to automatically call in subject matter experts when they are needed.
Real-time status information can also help customer service teams and other stakeholders deliver a better customer support experience. Having a record of incidents also means teams can learn from them and use this to prevent future ones.
Reduced Costs
IDC quantifies the value of IT staff efficiencies at an annual average of $2,447,878 per organization through PagerDuty. But these costs could be much higher if thousands of customers are affected. Any incident can incur cost. Whether it’s direct costs, such as lost revenue and customers leaving you, or indirect costs such brand reputation damage and engineers working on resolutions instead of new innovations, incidents can have a big dollar value attached to them.
Old, ticket-based, and manual approaches to IT operations can’t cut it in the fast-paced cloud world. This is why organizations shifting to the cloud must modernize and simplify how they manage IT operations. It can help to lower the costs of incidents by reducing the number of escalations and slashing the time it takes to solve incidents.
Failure to modernize IT operations will result in spiraling customer-impact incidents, costing organizations time and money.
Improve Productivity, Save Time
The cloud unlocks scale and agility that can enable an organization to innovate at pace and respond rapidly to the market and customer demands. But having developers and technical teams spending too much time on incident response can hamper their ability to innovate.
Modernizing IT operations improves productivity by reducing escalations by up to 40%. With this time back, your developers can focus on the things that matter: improving services and delivering the innovations that will improve the organization’s market standing and customer experience. This also significantly improves their job satisfaction and reduces burnout.
For organizations adopting the cloud, the benefits are clear. But going all in on the cloud means organizations must modernize and simplify IT operations. Service ownership and automation are critical to this effort. And if implemented correctly, they can be business game changers, helping organizations make the most of the cloud, enabling them to achieve growth, scale, and the agility required in the digital era.
