Get Unique IT Insights That Help You Make The Right Decisions Fast – Cisco Blogs

Digital agility has become the most sought-after capability for most organizations following the explosion of the pandemic. Like some kind of experiment in quantum physics, everything has been accelerated by orders of magnitude.

Whether it’s supporting new hybrid workplace models, addressing business resilience, or building new digital experiences, these priorities have assumed business-critical status. This is driving IT groups to reimagine applications, transform the infrastructure, secure the enterprise and empower teams to ultimately enable new ways of doing business. Achieving that in a cloud-first world, though, drives a radical transformation of the ways we connect, secure and automate everything.

Introducing Connected IT Insights

To deliver actionable insights about the exceptionally fast technology evolution we’re seeing today and identify, quantify and track changes over time, Cisco has looked under the hood of our platforms, which contain huge volumes of data generated by our customer base.

We extracted, analyzed and correlated this anonymized data to produce insights about the changes that happened in 2020. We then categorized these insights by customer priority and have made them available via our Connected IT Insights interactive experience, together with our observations and recommendations.

Here are some highlights from the inaugural release of Connected IT Insights:

1. A steep rise in the number of anomalies detected across applications, cloud, and Internet resources
2. Our customers prefer multicloud environments, and an overwhelming majority of them overprovisioned their cloud resources to manage the accelerated pace of change
3. Managed Service Providers were the top target for cyber-attacks in 2020
4. IT Teams are taking advantage of the AI/ML engine recommendations to manage the increase workload

Implications for IT teams

There is a compelling reason why we chose to call our new interactive experience “Connected IT Insights”. Our technology platforms are typically used by different IT Operations teams, like Applications (AppOps), Security (SecOps), Networking (NetOps) and Cloud Infrastructure (InfraOps).

However, the data clearly show how change dynamics cut across the entire IT organization. This means that IT Teams can only be successful if they connect with each other to gain real-time insights about the digital experience they deliver to support the business.

As the cloud becomes the dominant application infrastructure and the Internet the new backbone, the ability to gain speed and agility increases dramatically.

At the same time though, the number of “blind spots” for the IT Operations teams increases both in size and number as demonstrated by our findings concerning cloud and Internet anomalies.

The implication is that IT strategies need to evolve at the same speed of the architectural change we’re observing. In particular:

• Platforms need to provide intelligence to enable optimization of the application experience that also includes the cloud and internet services not under direct control of the IT organization
• Processes need to evolve to enable better management of the digital experience and the impacts on business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• Cross-domain knowledge becomes a critical skillset for IT professionals because the main vectors of technology evolution – cloud native, SASE, IT/OT convergence (to mention a few) – are relentlessly blurring the traditional borders between IT and DevOps teams

We will continue to update Cisco Connected IT Insights on a regular basis with new data points and insights helping you and your IT Teams to make informed decisions fast.

Visit Cisco Connected IT Insights to explore the interactive experience.

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