By Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco Observability
Digital experience is now positioned at the heart of almost every organization’s strategic priorities. Whether it’s driving employee engagement to address skills gaps and boost productivity, reaching new and diverse audiences, or deepening relationships (and expanding revenue streams) with existing customers, businesses must deliver exceptional digital experiences to be successful. We’ve reached the point where “experience is everything.”
Globally, consumer demand for applications and digital services is on the rise, focused on innovative, personalized, and intuitive experiences. Brands failing to meet these expectations are being abandoned. Consequently, digital experiences have become a crucial battleground for businesses. Success here can attract customers, strengthen relationships, and boost sales, while failure results in losing customers, revenue, and reputation.
Not surprisingly, experience is now a key focus in boardrooms around the world. Recent research from Cisco reveals that 75 per cent of senior global business leaders emphasize the increased importance of digital experience for C-level executives in their organizations over the past three years. Consequently, they are pushing their IT teams to ensure applications and digital services are available, secure and performing at an optimal level at all times.
Visibility into application performance enables business leaders to identify opportunities and manage risk
In 80 per cent of organizations, C-level executives routinely receive reports on the performance of business-critical applications, digital services and their business impact. Business leaders are now diving deeper into application performance data to gain a comprehensive understanding of the experiences customers and employees have with their brand.
This trend is driven by two primary factors. First, leaders need insights into application performance to identify trends, highlight areas bringing substantial business value, and capitalize on these opportunities. Second, they aim to pinpoint potential availability, performance, and security issues that could significantly jeopardize digital experiences. They’re urgently looking to mitigate risk and avoid a revenue-impacting incident.
For example, in the retail sector, business leaders now want to be able to scrutinize the performance of every stage of the user journey, from sign-up to check-out. They want to analyze the speed and efficiency of every phase of the workflow, identify what is working well and where improvements could be made. And crucially, they want to know where vulnerabilities exist within applications in order to manage risk.
It’s a similar story in other industries. Leaders in financial services firms are placing a massive focus on digital experience monitoring to compete and win against emerging and disruptive digital-first competition, and within manufacturing, leaders are scrutinizing the performance of each process across their vast SAP landscapes.
Threats to Digital Experience Arise from Escalating IT Complexity
For IT teams tasked with developing, deploying, and sustaining applications, the stakes are higher than ever. They understand that even minor lapses in digital experiences could yield significant repercussions for their organizations.
The reality though is that most IT teams simply don’t have the tools and insights they need to manage modern application environments in an effective and sustainable manner. And, as a result, they’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of firefighting, trying to identify and fix application performance issues ideally before the end user experience is impacted.
Anybody working in or around an IT department will know how much more complex enterprise IT environments have become over recent years. The shift to cloud native technologies has left technologists trying to manage an increasingly fragmented and dynamic landscape, where everything is continually changing. Additionally, it has also exposed major visibility gaps across hybrid IT environments, where organizations are still deploying separate and siloed monitoring tools for on-premises and cloud native technologies.
Observability is essential for technologists to deliver exceptional digital experiences
To overcome this challenge, IT teams need to progress from traditional monitoring approaches and implement full-stack observability, to generate unified visibility across both cloud native and on-premises environments. With observability, IT teams can get real-time insights into IT availability and performance up and down the IT stack, from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure. And they can integrate security into the development lifecycle from day one, speeding up innovation and resulting in more robust applications.
With full-stack observability, IT teams can provide business leaders with a comprehensive set of metrics and insights related to experience – from number of unique sessions, average revenue per session and average revenue per transaction, through to ‘revenue at risk’ from potential outages, and overall user experience (based on defined workflows).
Ultimately, full-stack observability not only ensures seamless alignment with IT and broader business strategies, it also cultivates a common language between IT and business stakeholders, including C-level executives. This cohesion is essential for organizations looking to excel in a market where digital experience increasingly dictates commercial success.
Scam Call Turns Deadly With An Uber Driver Being Killed
Posted in Commentary with tags Scam on April 16, 2024 by itnerdI have dealt with scammers for years. But this is the first time that I have heard of a scam leading to someone to being killed. I have for you a news report where a man in Ohio was being bombarded with scam calls, which lead to an Uber driver being shot and killed by said man. Here’s the video that describes what happened. And I will say that this is not for the faint of heart:
What this appears to be is a scam where instead of the scammers using electronic means to steal money from you, they somehow get you to withdraw cash and then have someone pick it up from you. That someone may be an intermediary who delivers it to someone else who sends the money to its final destination, or they may do that themselves. This is sometimes referred to as a “Hawala” which you can get more info here.
Now the police have arrested this man for shooting the Uber driver. But what I wish would also happen, but I don’t see it happening, is that the scumbags behind this scam get tracked down and arrested as well as they are just as guilty in this Uber driver’s death. I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Scammers are the lowest forms of life out there. They need to be treated like cockroaches and exterminated with extreme prejudice. And the fact that this happened illustrates why that needs to happen sooner rather than later.
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