IT modernization is necessary if organizations want to meet their customer experience and mission objectives. Our survey revealed that while organizations clearly see the need, they are hampered from moving forward, and the issues they face make them less confident in achieving success. Primary among these challenges is the lack of understanding of interrelationships and the state of operations due to the inability to gain the visibility needed to make decisions among a complex web of systems and applications. Lack of visibility leads to a deficiency in insights to make informed decisions.
Organizations are also concerned about the situation after modernization. Without holistic visibility into the desired environment, they face blind spots that hinder them from quickly identifying problems and troubleshooting them.
It is clear that most agencies will end up with a hybrid environment as part of IT modernization to meet their mission objectives. But once these agencies start mixing and matching different types of cloud solutions, as well as different vendors and service models, things can get complicated. IT administrators need to know how all the components, regardless of their place of activity, are performing and interacting. But it can be difficult to get a clear view of disparate workloads without the capability to gain holistic visibility across these deployments.
As agencies modernize, end-to-end operational visibility is essential before, during and after the journey. Agencies need a baseline before getting started, and metrics and KPIs from current state of operations are critical. Once at hand, agencies now know what the minimal baseline operations need to be once they migrate to the new state. By keeping tabs during migration, staff can identify any issues in real time, roll back processes and fix problems before it is too late.
The path forward is embracing a platform that will give organizations end-to-end visibility and granular insights into their operational environment, including availability and performance of applications and processes. Extending real-time situational awareness during and after migrations will help agencies overcome process challenges, drive successful modernization initiatives, address exceptions, improve efficiencies and deliver superior citizen experiences.
And what does operational visibility look like in a hybrid cloud environment? It’s an end-to-end view of infrastructure performance across application workloads, microservices and other components that make up that service, wherever they may reside. It provides the intelligence needed to monitor and measure metrics to ensure a compelling user experience when infrastructure spans multiple domains.
Here are some best practices that can help ensure successful migrations:
Before a migration, it is important to measure baseline user experience and performance, as well as define acceptable post-migration levels. Degradation in one performance area may be tolerated if it’s balanced or offset by gains in another, all the while ensuring that the overall experience or performance is not compromised. To accurately validate a migration’s success, the same monitoring tool should be used throughout the migration process.
During a migration, established performance metrics should be closely monitored in real time. Variation from the baseline can be an early indicator of trouble, providing an opportunity to take corrective action. A monitoring solution’s dashboard and alerts will quickly identify these issues well before production, and save time and resources. A performance issue is better identified during a migration – when it’s easier to pause and make corrections.
After a migration, the same monitoring solution should be used to measure acceptable metrics and success. And continued use of the solution and dashboards, well after the switchover, is essential to ensure compelling customer journeys that cross on-premises and cloud workloads.
This post is an excerpt from GovLoop’s research brief “How Visibility Accelerates Successful IT Modernization in the Pubic Sector.” Download the full report here.
