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All Your IT Team Wants This Holiday Season is a Break!

The holiday season is all about giving. As organizations increasingly look to IT as they move toward new digital tools and processes, now is the perfect time to give back to IT teams tirelessly working to keep the modern enterprise online. Whether your system performance has been naughty or nice this year, there’s no denying that tech professionals have earned our appreciation, respect—and the tools to set them up for success in 2024. For IT teams limited in both time and resources, simply maintaining systems can feel as impossible as squeezing themselves down a chimney or delivering gifts to millions of homes in a single night. On top of that, instead of being greeted with milk and cookies, they’re inundated with endless performance issues, support requests and alerts—leaving little time left over for the important work of innovating. They say the best gifts are the ones you can’t wrap. That holds true for IT teams, too. This year, bring your organization the gift of a simpler, speedier, more rewarding workload. If your team is dreaming of a tech-savvy future, here are some enterprise software solutions to make their lives easier that they won’t want to re-gift: Enjoy the View With Observability Everyone loves to cozy up at home during a winter snowstorm, but with the widespread migration to combined remote, on-premises and distributed hybrid environments, the daily monitoring journey for today’s IT teams is more akin to trekking blindly through a blizzard. Observability tools are metaphorical snowshoes and goggles that can help them not only weather the storm but see clearly from the mountaintop. Observability is the answer to the modern enterprise’s struggle to gain full visibility into their organization’s apps, networks, databases and infrastructure—something nearly half of IT professionals lack, according to SolarWinds research. IT teams will be able to rest easier at night with visions of sugarplums, rather than outages or anomalies, dancing in their heads. Even better, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into observability solutions to collect and provide data on what’s not performing as expected and why will help your teams take a proactive approach to solving issues. Lend a Helping Hand With AIOps AI isn’t just the shiny new toy of the tech world. Organizations using AI for IT operations (AIOps) can give the gift of support to their overworked IT teams by automating some of the time-consuming and mundane tasks that stand between them and a focus on innovation. Adding AIOps to observability can provide IT teams with maximum visibility into the state of their digital ecosystems through automated discovery and dependency mapping. Additionally, your teams can gain the ability to easily track inbound connections linked across the organization’s application stack and storage volumes with auto-instrumented views. Today, it simply isn’t feasible for humans alone to manage modern IT environments without intelligent automation. Think of AIOps as a workshop of elves operating in the background to ensure workloads and processes are streamlined and moving as efficiently as possible. With AIOps in place to analyze data and streamline workloads and processes, IT teams are relieved of some pressure—and can focus on accelerating your digital transformation rather than just maintaining it. Give the Gift of Time Finally, although you can’t outright give the gift of time to your IT team, you can still arm them with […]

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How Event-Driven Architectures Drive Real-Time Operations

People, events, the human brain—in fact, the whole world operate in real-time, but businesses have struggled to keep up. With the help of event-driven architecture (EDA) and the Open API economy, businesses can now do the same. The power of an event-driven world means that, after years of geopolitical events affecting how businesses operate, many businesses are starting to uncover real value by truly being able to operate in real-time. Whether it be retail and manufacturing or energy and resources and financial services, locating and responding to vital issues within a company’s supply chains or product lines in real-time, is key to success. Amazon’s CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, said that “the world is event driven” in his keynote speech at AWS re:Invent in December 2022. Now, new IDC research unveils that nine out of 10 of the world’s largest companies will deploy real-time intelligence driven by event-streaming technologies by 2025. But What’s the Secret Behind Such Success? A recent IDC Infobrief, sponsored by Solace, surveyed over 300 enterprise IT professionals in North America, Asia and Europe, all of whom work for large companies implementing or considering EDA. The results are quite telling–an overwhelming 93% of respondents at companies that have deployed EDA across multiple use cases said EDA has either met or exceeded their expectations. In addition to technical advantages from EDA, most businesses also see clear business benefits: A full 23% of respondents reported increasing productivity; 22% said better customer acquisition and 18% saw revenues increase as a result of EDA efforts. 1. Get Support From the Top to Ensure Alignment Throughout Expanding the footprint of EDA across the enterprise is a journey, and every journey starts by assembling those that are critical to its overall success. Business sponsorship and engaging key stakeholders is vital, especially in the early days of EDA adoption – 56% of respondents in the early EDA stages cited this as a priority when ROI and business benefits may not be immediately clear. The impact of well-aligned C-suite, operational and technical teams is reflective of business-level digital maturity, too. As 35% of respondents at an advanced stage of EDA rollout felt C-level support was critical, it comes as no surprise that respondents with higher levels of EDA maturity also have higher levels of overall digital maturity, including digital strategy and change management support. 2. Tackle Complexities Head-On With the Backing of IT As EDA becomes more pervasive across an organization, demands on IT become more sophisticated, requiring a deepening of EDA skills in the IT organization, notably with DevOps teams, developers and architects. More than one-third (36.1%) of respondents cited the lack of skills to execute EDA as a hurdle to adoption. Approaches to logging, governance and oversight (30.7%) can also become increasingly challenging and must be thought through carefully. This is where EDA providers themselves need to step up and provide adequate training and a certification path for architects DevOps and developers looking to gain the fundamental knowledge and skills to design and implement event-driven systems. This should include technical details such as understanding various design patterns for EDA, microservices choreography versus orchestration, the saga pattern and RESTful microservices. Education should also clearly define and demonstrate key concepts and tools for EDA success, such as event portal, topic hierarchy best practices and event mesh. […]

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