Every year presents change, adversity, and lessons to learn—but 2020 took that principle to an extreme. Read on to get some insights for making sure your organization’s 2021 is one that’s characterized by improved IT resilience.
“There is no education like adversity.”
—Benjamin Disraeli
I have no doubt that in the months and years ahead, there will be massive volumes of books, articles, blog posts, and other write ups dissecting the year that was 2020. If adversity is indeed the educator Disreali made it out to be, it’s a safe bet that many of us will come into 2021 much, much smarter than when we entered 2020.
For those of us working in enterprise IT, the past months have taught some clear lessons. Here are two that jump immediately to mind:
Heading into 2021, many enterprises will be confronting a number of pressing challenges as they seek to contend with the two imperatives above:
As they battle the obstacles outlined above, teams in today’s enterprises are encountering a number of limitations:
As you enter into 2021, following are some key strategies that can propel your ITOps teams and business:
Chaos engineering embodies a mindset in which, instead of assuming no failures will occur, it is understood that failures will be inevitable. When adopting this approach, teams deliberately introduce failures in their production environments, which drives developers to build in resilience.
Gartner analysts estimate that “By 2025, 60% of I&O leaders will implement chaos engineering to add resilience and velocity improvements to value stream flow, increasing system availability by 10%.”4
Moving forward, it will be vital to incorporate IT resilience roles that are aligned with SRE initiatives. These new IT resilience roles can help enhance collaboration and alignment between DR and product teams.
Gartner analysts anticipate that, “Through 2025, 20% of enterprises will go beyond SRE by adding IT resilience roles to improve resiliency posture between product teams and traditional DR.”5
When taking on IT resilience roles, staff focus on these critical efforts:
Across teams and organizations, staff need to establish a laser focus on customers. Toward that end, it is increasingly vital for teams to focus on KPIs that are aligned with customer value. This will ultimately be a key to success. In their report, Gartner analysts reveal that “Agile and DevOps teams who focus only on technical performance metrics (at the exclusion of customer-value-centric metrics) will fail to align their priorities with the organization.”6
By leveraging AI and automation, teams can be better informed and more effectively interact with other team members and across teams. With these capabilities, teams can begin to get a better understanding of the quality attributes of an incoming release, which can be shared with operations, DR, and SRE teams.
AI and automation can also foster more effective, data-driven collaboration. With these capabilities, teams can better segment issues and establish causality of issues across the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. For example, based on deeper intelligence, analysts may uncover that 50 unplanned outages were associated with a specific application component, and see that any time changes are introduced in that area, there’s a higher likelihood of incidents to arise. These kinds of insights can be indispensable as teams seek to boost IT resilience.
Serge Lucio is Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom (ESD). In this role, he is responsible for the company's BizOps solutions that help organizations scale their digital transformation by fusing business and IT. Mr. Lucio joined the company through the CA Technologies acquisition where he was most recently SVP Product and Strategy for the mainframe business unit. Prior to this role, he held various leadership roles across Product Management, Strategy, and M&A at IBM. Mr. Lucio earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Telecom Nancy, France, and holds several patents in the Software Test Automation space.
To learn more about key strategies for success as your teams enter 2021, be sure to review this Gartner report: Predicts 2021: Value Streams Will Define the Future of DevOps
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