Applications are driving digital transformation – Cisco Blogs

Digital transformation is being discussed in every boardroom and executive leadership meeting around the world, in almost every industry. With COVID, the timelines and expectations have increased dramatically. The impact of the pandemic has been felt across every industry in a way that no-one could have predicted–bank branches closed, car dealerships were temporarily shut down, shopping for groceries meant exposure some could not risk, children were learning from screens at home rather than classrooms, and, with the exception of essential services, most employees were told to work from home.

Shifting the Business Model and Areas of Investment

For technologists around the world, the pressure to deliver the digital transformation their businesses needed hit an all-time high, and customer and employee digital experience expectations skyrocketed. Companies have to rework how they do business, pivoting their entire strategies to serve customers in new ways and enable employees to work effectively during the pandemic.

This saw technologists being asked to deliver innovation projects at incredible speed–71% of technologists reported that digital transformation projects were being approved within weeks rather than year(s); and 71% reported they were being implemented in weeks rather than months or years.

This huge shift and reliance on digital channels is seeing technologists move to the forefront of the business, responsible for helping organizations minimize the commercial impact of the pandemic, and the pressure on technologists shows no sign of decreasing in the coming months. In fact, in AppDynamics’ latest Agent of Transformation research of over 1000 global technologists, 88% believe that the biggest challenge they will face in 2021 will be the need to drive through transformation at speed.

Technologists implemented digital transformation projects faster in 2020 than ever before, but that level of innovation brought with it new challenges. IT teams are reporting crippling complexity across their IT infrastructure caused by urgent innovation and technology sprawl across on-premise and cloud architectures.

Digital properties have become the priority area of investment, with the expectation to quickly spin up new digital services for customers and employees, manage increased traffic on digital channels, and ensure their properties are secure.

Add to that the challenge of delivering world class digital experiences, and technologists are feeling under immense pressure (89%), frustrated about work (81%) and reporting increased levels of conflict with colleagues (63%).

Full-Stack Observability

Transforming your business to build an environment that is nimble and ready to shift as the business shifts, or more importantly, as customers demand, is now critical. However, the current complexity of IT environments is stifling organizations’ ability to do this–with infinite streams of live and historical data from across the stack, relentless changes, and distributed cloud architectures, it has become too complex for operators to fully comprehend modern environments and manage all their digital properties.

In fact, 75% of technologists told us they are struggling to manage overwhelming ‘data noise’ without the resources and support they need; and 83% said that the inability to prioritize technology performance fixes based on potential business impact will be a challenge in 2021. IT can’t afford to ignore the impact of technology performance on the customer or the wider business; in the current climate, the cost of that failure is too high.

To create great digital experiences, companies need to have broader visibility across their entire digital estate, from the business, the user experience, and the entire IT stack with applications, infrastructures, networks, and its security. But technologists have also recognized that the ability to monitor the IT stack is simply not enough on its own. IT leaders are reaching out to AppDynamics to find a solution that can help them prioritize the business and user performance fixes based on business impact.

Our Vision

At AppDynamics, our vision is to empower businesses to thrive by turning performance into profit. As part of Cisco, we are uniquely positioned to deliver true, full-stack observability, but more importantly, we are adding the business context needed to pinpoint problems and prioritize fixes based on the impact to revenue.

The AppDynamics Business Observability platform allows businesses to connect the dots up and down the stack—from the business analytics, to the customer or employee-facing experiences, all the way down to the lowest level network and infrastructure health. Empowered with the business lens, technologists can pinpoint the most critical data and contextualize IT performance insights with real time business data, enabling them to prioritize actions, innovations and investments based on the direct impact to the business. This enables them to be more strategic, to better prioritize what they respond to and how resources are deployed, while never losing sight of what’s most important—their business, customers, employees, and users.

Together, Cisco and AppDynamics give businesses the ability to know where the strengths and weaknesses lie inside the IT architecture and deliver the sort of consistently excellent digital experiences that customers and employees demand. We reinforce full-stack observability by combining the power of application performance monitoring with AppDynamics, network monitoring with ThousandEyes, infrastructure optimization with Intersight and application security with the new Cisco Secure Application solution.

The AppDynamics Business Observability platform enables businesses to see problems across the complete environment and gives traditionally disparate teams—infrastructure, network, security, application—the data necessary to quickly identify root causes and fix them, often before the user even knows there’s a problem.

With the dramatic changes in the business environment, the acceleration of digital transformation, and customer and employee digital expectations at an all-time high, technologists need to cut through the data noise to quickly identify the root cause of performance issues across their digital properties and prioritize based on the business needs.

The AppDynamics Business Observability platform empowers technologists to observe what matters by applying a business lens to full-stack observability and IT performance, focusing on what matters most and delivering a world class digital experience and true business value.

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Download our latest report, Agents of Transformation: The Rise of Full Stack Observability,

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