Cutting Across the Information Spaghetti: A Unified Approach

Today, the web is the most complex and challenging environment for businesses. After the arrival of Web 2.0, which provided interactive, content-rich internet, customers have grown to expect a certain agility and speed in their online experience, meaning any minor lag can cause steep losses for businesses.

"Slow is the new down" for online businesses. As many as 47 percent of online customers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 52 percent of customers say they remain loyal to the site that loads the fastest. Further, a majority of customers abandon a website or app that takes more than three seconds to load, with 79 percent of customers never returning to a slow site after a bad experience. On top of this, around 43 percent of customers who encounter a bad experience while shopping online tell their friends and family about it. All of this highlights the implications your website's performance has on your business.

Businesses of all sizes have a lot to lose, as every second of delay can lose a business customers — a one percent delay in website loading time can equate to losing seven percent of customers. In late 2018, many users were frustrated when Google services went down. The same year, Barclays made the news for a service outage, a costly incident for any financial organization. During Black Friday sales — a peak sales period for many businesses in the retail industry — Facebook's ad platform suffered an outage. This sparked conversation about what it takes to ensure an uninterrupted, smooth, and fluid user experience.

The key to quickly fixing delays like these lies in establishing a unified approach to IT development and operations, called DevOps. Many companies over the years have accumulated a part-cloud, part-legacy, multi-vendor IT hodgepodge that needs to be addressed first.

Old-school IT development offers a clear separation between development and operation teams in terms of skill and engagement. Modern IT, however, relies on merging the two, creating a new path known as DevOps. An engineer on this merged path will be capable of not only writing code and deploying it, but also running it, fixing problems, and providing analysis.

At the organizational level, companies should holistically revamp their IT infrastructure to suit a DevOps approach. Using multiple IT solution vendors complicates the entire workflow rather than simplifying it.

12 major reasons for IT failure include:

● Handling multiple, complex invoices
● A myriad of billing cycles
● Multiple logins
● Multiple interfaces — or the lack of a unified one
● Complexities in both security breaches and the IT solutions built to mitigate them
● Rising training costs
● Tough access controls
● Data teething problems
● Vested interests
● Legacy IT
● Hidden costs
● IT solutions vendors going out of business

To address the challenges across user, application, platform, and infrastructure layers, businesses need to take a unified approach to IT, which will help DevOps achieve more uptime and better performance.

Software is not about how well each layer of the stack works individually, but how well each layer works together to ensure a better end-user experience. IT teams need an all-in-one monitoring solution that can monitor all layers of the full stack, so that everything they need is available in one place. This is why fostering a DevOps culture with a choice of a single-vendor approach for unified monitoring is the recipe for success.

Originally published on Express Computer.