In the face of mounting technology complexity and a fast-changing business climate, the proliferation of digital services spread across on-premises, software as a service (SaaS), and public cloud is making it difficult to deliver optimal application performance and user experiences.
IT organizations are juggling an array of challenges. The number of apps they must manage is expanding at a furious pace. User expectations are soaring among customers, partners, and internal employees. And on top of that, IT organizations are grappling with the lack of visibility into their environment as limited application and business insights erode their ability to prioritize actions for user experience as well as business performance.[1]
Apart from user experience challenges, operational resilience is a continuing struggle with outsized ramifications for the bottom line. Without visibility into IT infrastructure, businesses run the risk of technical problems, heightened security threats, and execution delays. Downtime is another pressing issue: Nearly half (47%) of the respondents to an IDC/Cisco survey pegged the average cost of an hour of downtime at $250,000 or more.[2]
FSO: Benefits for IT and business
Full-stack observability (FSO), which gives IT organizations a window into what’s happening across application domains so they can predict and prevent issues, uses advanced analytics models across the network, applications, cybersecurity controls, cloud, and the digital experience. In turn, FSO solutions leverage data, user experiences, and network telemetry to detect and resolve issues before they morph into bigger problems.
FSO solutions empower enterprises to make the leap from reactive response to proactive action, driving efficiencies, propelling revenue growth, and creating better customer experiences. Three-quarters of the respondents to the IDC/Cisco survey said their CEO and business leadership understands that visibility into and control over infrastructure, network, applications, security, and digital experience are critical to digital business success.[3]
With FSO, IT teams can be more operationally efficient, monitoring traditional, hybrid, and cloud-native applications to ensure peak performance while taking the guesswork out of workloads’ resource allocation. FSO also enables IT organizations to map app-to-infrastructure dependencies to prevent overprovisioning, thus lowering costs. And FSO solutions provide insights to help teams prioritize issues with the greatest impact on the business and user experience so they can resolve them accordingly.
Besides providing lower costs, process efficiencies, and reduced business risks, FSO ensures that IT makes good on its objective to link its performance with real business outcomes. This paves the way for a more responsive and resilient digital infrastructure, which leads to happier customers, more innovation, and sustained business and revenue growth.
With so much riding on digital infrastructure and experience, having greater visibility into and control over the entire IT landscape will separate digital businesses that are agile and responsive from those that are not.
Click here to learn more about Cisco Full-stack Observability solutions.
[1] “Agents of Transformation 2021: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability Report,” AppDynamics
[2] “An Executive Blueprint for an Observability Platform: Driving Operational Excellence and Business Outcomes through Analytics and Automation”
[3] “An Executive Blueprint for an Observability Platform: Driving Operational Excellence and Business Outcomes through Analytics and Automation”