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.
Cineplex Appears To Be Under Attack…. Again
Posted in Commentary with tags Cineplex, Hacked on April 17, 2024 by itnerdI’ve been tipped off to Canadian movie theatre chain Cineplex being under a credential stuffing attack. This is not the first time that this has happened from what I can tell. Which makes me wonder why Cineplex is a frequent target of this.
In any case, users who are affected by this credential stuffing attack will get an email that looks like this:
Now when one gets an email like this, they should validate that the email is legitimate by checking the email addresses of who sent it and the reply to email address. Both of those checked out when I examined the email that a reader of this blog got. But that doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. What you should always do if you get one of these emails is go directly to the website and try to log in. If you can’t log in, you should reset the password from there. Or put another way, you should not trust the links that are in any email because even if the email addresses check out, they could have been spoofed.
In the case of this user, they followed my advice to the letter, but Cineplex never sent them a password reset email. That’s a sure sign that Cineplex has larger issues at the moment that are not good for Cineplex. I don’t expect the company to say anything on this. But if they did, I suspect the news will not be positive. In the meantime, if you get one of these email, you should try to take action as soon as you can.
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