91% of UAE technologists believe application observability is a strategic priority for their organisations
Cisco AppDynamics’ latest report, The Age of Application Observability, which surveyed 1,140 IT professionals including several in the UAE, reveals the levels of complexity that technologists are encountering as they implement cloud native technologies alongside existing on-premises applications and infrastructure.
Crippling complexity is impacting end user experience
Rapid adoption of cloud native technologies is bringing overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data into the IT department, which traditional monitoring tools just aren’t designed to handle. In fact, 80% of technologists across the Emirates state that the increased volume of data from hybrid environments is making manual monitoring impossible.
The shift to hybrid environments is also impacting companies’ security posture — 92% of technologists in the UAE report that the shift to hybrid environments is leading to an expansion of attack surfaces and heightened vulnerability to cybersecurity threats. Most IT departments are still deploying separate tools to monitor on-premises and cloud native applications, and this means they have no clear line of sight of the entire application path across hybrid environments.
For regional IT teams, it’s becoming extremely difficult to troubleshoot issues before they impact end user experience. And the potential consequences of this are profound — an increased likelihood of disruption and downtime to applications, which in turn can lead to a loss of customers, reputation and revenue.
Organisations risk an IT talent exodus
The increased complexity caused by hybrid environments is also being felt more personally by technologists who find themselves operating under relentless pressure. Silos are emerging between IT teams and morale is worsening. 36% of UAE technologists claim that silos and ineffective collaboration are already leading to team members leaving their organisation, and 40% see increase in staff churn as one of the costs of having to manage complexity.
Evidently, IT leaders need to act quickly to avoid a talent exodus within their IT departments, something that no organisation can afford when IT skills are in such high demand.
Observability is critical to optimise application performance and validate cloud investments
As regional organisations continue to operate with hybrid environments, almost all (99%) of surveyed technologists across the Emirates confirmed the need to move beyond traditional monitoring approaches and implement application observability. Crucially, they need to implement a solution which provides flexibility to span across both cloud native and on-premises environments — with telemetry data from cloud native environments and agent-based entities within on-premises applications being ingested into the same platform.
UAE technologists believe that this level of unified observability — providing a single source of truth for all IT teams — will bring a wide range of benefits. These include deeper insight to detect and solve the root cause of issues (55%), and the ability to bring together dispersed IT infrastructure and applications (51%). They also feel that application observability will help to improve productivity in the IT department (61%) and forge closer collaboration between teams and unite all technologists around a shared vision and common goals (45%).
Crucially, given that 84% of UAE technologists report heightened scrutiny on cloud investments within their organisation, 75% of them note that application observability will allow IT leaders to correlate IT performance data with business transactions so they can track the impact of their innovation initiatives in real-time. Regional organisations can approach innovation in a more controlled and sustainable manner, directing their time and investment where it will have the biggest impact.
Application observability is now an urgent, strategic priority for organisations
Momentum around application observability is building, with 91% of surveyed UAE technologists stating that this is now a strategic priority for their organisation. Furthermore, 64% claim that their organisation is already analysing application observability solutions, and 35% report that they will do so in the next 12 months.
This is hugely encouraging and reflects a strong desire amongst UAE technologists to finally get to grips with the complexity that has become such a drain on IT teams over the last few years.
Application observability is now critical for organisations to deliver always-on, seamless digital experiences and to achieve their ambitions for rapid and sustainable innovation. IT leaders must act quickly and decisively to implement the right observability solution for their organisation.
