The IT Nerd

A recent high profile digital service outage saw Facebook – including its other services/brands Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus – offline for over 6 hours, causing widespread disruption for consumers that use these applications and digital services on a daily basis, as well as businesses that rely them as part of their operations. 

But Facebook is not alone in facing this type of crisis.

In a world of sky-high expectations for digital experiences, and record levels of intolerance for poor-performing applications, this level of disruption can cause businesses significant financial cost and damage to reputation.   

In the immediate aftermath of the outage AppDynamics surveyed 1,011 global IT decision makers in 11 countries to gauge their concern surrounding the impact of major outages, understand the pressure they are facing and their confidence in the technology, tools and processes they are currently using. The results are as follows:

• 87% of enterprise technologists say they are concerned about the potential for a major outage and the resulting disruption to their applications and digital services. 
• 84% say that they feel pressure from their organization’s leadership to prevent a major performance issue or outage of their customer and employee facing applications and digital services.
• 87% admit that increasing complexity of their IT stack is already causing delays in identifying the root cause of issues.
• 97% of IT teams have some form of monitoring tools in place, many of which provide highly sophisticated and advanced methods of identifying and fixing anomalies. But they question the effectiveness of these tools in this new world. Only 27% are entirely confident that they meet their needs.
• 72% think it is critical or important that their organization deploys a full-stack observability solution within the next 12 months to solve complexity across their IT stack and identify and fix the root cause of an issue.

There is more information in this AppD blog post here: https://www.appdynamics.com/blog/news/businesses-fear-outages-full-stack-observability/.

Research conducted between 7th – 11th October 2021

 Cisco AppDynamics has today announced a significant addition to its executive leadership team with the appointment of Eric Schou as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The appointment comes at a key moment for AppDynamics as it continues to assert its leadership in Full-Stack Observability – a fast-growing, multi-billion dollar technology market. 

Eric joins AppDynamics from Splunk where he was Head of Security Marketing, and is an accomplished marketing professional with over 20 years experience at some of the biggest enterprise technology companies in the world, including Palo Alto Networks, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Good Technology (now BlackBerry Ltd.), McAfee and Symantec. In his new role, Eric will assume responsibility for driving awareness and demand for AppDynamics’ industry-leading Business Observability platform amongst enterprise IT decision makers and channel partners. In addition, he will also help to accelerate the delivery of Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability vision – of which AppDynamics is a critical component.  

You can stay up-to-date on the latest AppDynamics news on their blog and newsroom.

Cisco AppDynamics today released the latest report in its App Attention Index research series, revealing consumer reliance on applications and digital services has soared since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The global study, which examined the digital behaviors of more than 13,000 global consumers, also identified consumers now have a zero tolerance policy for poor application experience and automatically place blame on the application and brand, no matter where a performance issue stems from.

Consumers blame the brand when the application experience fails

Since the start of 2020, consumers have experienced a sudden and total reliance on digital services, altering how they engage with brands, consume goods and services, and make purchasing decisions. In fact, the research shows that people are using 30 percent more applications today than they did before the pandemic.

The research highlights that because of their increasing reliance and use of digital services, 76 percent of consumers say their expectations of digital services have increased since the start of 2020. Alarmingly for brands, when their expectations aren’t met 60 percent of consumers will now automatically blame the application and the brand no matter where the issue actually lives. Whether it’s within the application itself – such as pages loading slowly, downtime, or security failures; or external factors like internet connectivity, slow payment gateways or technical issues with third party services – to the consumer there is no distinction and they will now place responsibility firmly on the brand.

• 72 percent of people believe it’s the responsibility of the brand to ensure that the digital service or application works perfectly.
• 92 percent say they expect digital services to have reliable, consistent performance.

Loyalty lies with brands that invest in application experience

Consumers have not only come to rely on applications and digital services to function in everyday life, but they also used them to facilitate social interactions in the absence of traditional ways of connecting in person. The research found that the majority of consumers (85%) say that digital services have become a critical part of daily life, with 84 percent stating they helped them get through the pandemic in a positive way. Additionally, consumers are now loyal to brands based on how significantly they invested in digital services during the pandemic.

• 72 percent say they feel grateful to the brands that invested in digital during the pandemic so they could get access to the services that they love and rely on.
• 67 percent say they feel more loyal to brands that went above and beyond with the quality of their digital service during the pandemic.

Brands have one shot to get the ‘total application experience’ right

61 percent of consumers now state their expectations for digital services have changed forever and they will no longer tolerate poor performance. The research goes on to find that 72 percent of consumers believe it’s the responsibility of the brand to ensure that digital services work perfectly, and more than half (57%) state that brands have one shot to impress them with their digital experiences before they switch to another provider. 

• 72 percent say they simply don’t care who is responsible for problems with digital services, they just want them fixed and to work.
• 68 percent consider it disrespectful to users for brands to offer a poor digital experience in this day and age.
• 57 percent believe most problems with digital services and applications are completely avoidable.

73 percent of consumers stated that even as life returns to normal, they know they will continue to rely on the digital services they utilized during the pandemic. This means the pressure technologists are under to tackle the complexities of modern architectures in order to deliver flawless digital experiencesisn’t going away.

Cisco AppDynamics is committed to helping technologists take on these challenges of leading technology health and performance to deliver the ‘total application experience’ to users. To learn more about Cisco’s full-stack observability solution and how the AppDynamics Business Observability platform can help technologists deliver the ‘total application experience’ to consumers, visit appdynamics.com.

Other Resources:

• App Attention Index 2021 Report

Research Methodology: 

The research included interviews with more than 13,000 consumers, including 2,000 interviews in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and 1,000 interviews within Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The research was conducted by Insight Avenue in June 2021.

Cisco AppDynamics, the industry leading Business Observability platform, today announced the expansion of its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering through five strategic new locations, enabling fast, secure and reliable access to the AppDynamics Business Observability platform. Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), new locations in Cape Town (South Africa), Hong Kong (China), London (England), São Paulo (Brazil) and Singapore will provide regional customers and partners with access to full-stack observability solutions that are secure, scalable and adhere to their local data residency regulations, enabling companies to deliver a superior digital experience

Recent research from Gartner indicates that almost 70 percent of organizations using cloud services today plan to increase their cloud spend in the wake of the disruption caused by COVID-19.

As technologists lead their company’s response to the pandemic, many are facing increasingly high pressures to innovate and scale digital services and migrating to a SaaS approach comes with strong considerations. Challenges with implementing SaaS services due to evolving data residency laws and regulations, as well as latency via cloud services that can exist based on proximity to SaaS locations, are areas of concern when considering a SaaS approach. However, modern CIOs recognize the urgent need for a secure, reliable and scalable SaaS solution to support their rapid digital transformation efforts and meet the ever-increasing user demand for flawless digital experience.

The addition of five new locations offers a solution to enterprises concerned with potential data sovereignty and governance requirements, and provides access for customers all around the globe. With points of presence already in place in Portland (US), Frankfurt (Germany), Mumbai (India) and Sydney (Australia), AppDynamics now has more SaaS support than any other vendor in the market.Recently acknowledged as a notable strength by Gartner, AppDynamics’ robust global SaaS footprint will ensure enterprise companies can focus on creating flawless digital experiences through the Cisco AppDynamics Business Observability platform, while achieving greater control around:

• Data Residency, Privacy and Security – Enables local enterprise businesses to comply with anticipated data residency regulations, comprehensive compliance and security certifications such as SOC 2 Type II, EU-US Data Transfer and GDPR-Ready.
• Scale – AppDynamics is delivered with the scalability of AWS providing high-speed access to data with lower total costs, less on-premises resources, and added support and maintenance.
• Faster Access to Innovation – customers can leverage the latest innovation from AppDynamics including cloud native services, APM, and application security through automated and seamless upgrades.

The addition of the five new locations comes on the heels of AppDynamics’ SaaS offering in India, announced in October 2020, and builds on the company’s global SaaS footprint across Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. With each location strategically selected based on regional user demand, AppDynamics is seeing evidence that this strategy is quickly meeting the needs of enterprises around the world. For example, its Frankfurt SaaS location doubled the amount of users in only 18 months.

AppDynamics’ new SaaS locations will be available as follows:

• Singapore (April 2021)
• London (April 2021)
• Hong Kong (July 2021
• São Paulo (July 2021)
• Cape Town (July 2021)

Learn more about AppDynamics SaaS and the company’s security and privacy assurance here.

Today Cisco announced the availability (in preview beginning this month) of its real-time translation feature while also dramatically expanding the language library from 10+ to more than 100 languages, ranging from Armenian to Zulu. As part of the all new Webex, organizations can provide employees with inclusive and seamless collaboration experiences, which is essential to supporting the needs of a workforce that is more globally dispersed than ever before.

Users can create their own personalized Webex meeting experience  by quickly and easily self-selecting the language of their choice from the most commonly used languages, such as Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish, as well as more localized languages such as Danish, Hindi, Malay, Turkish and Vietnamese. The personalized language experience provides a path through one of the major hurdles in global business – the language barrier. Now users can engage more fully in meetings, translating from English to 100+ other languages, enabling teams to communicate more effectively with each other, and opening new opportunities for businesses to build a more inclusive, global workforce.

For businesses, there’s a talent and cost benefit. The feature enables businesses to focus on finding the best talent regardless of wherever they call home or their native language. And a recent report from Metrigy on intelligent virtual assistants found that nearly 24% of participants have meetings that include non-English native speakers and of these, more than half have been using third-party services to translate meetings into other languages (incurring an average cost of $172 per meeting). Integrating intelligent virtual meeting assistants with language translation capabilities significantly reduces or even eliminates this cost entirely.

The expanded Real-Time Translation feature will be available in Webex as a preview starting this month and will be orderable and generally available in May.

One thing that you should note is that not all dialects are included in translation.

AppDynamics, a part of Cisco, today released Agents of Transformation 2021:The Rise of Full-Stack Observability, the latest edition of its global research study, exploring the impact of the rapid acceleration of digital transformation created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the repercussions for global technologists. The findings reveal a dramatic increase in IT complexity caused by the need for urgent innovation – and the resulting technology sprawl. The research also validates a pressing need for full-stack observability with added business context to help technologists manage the IT estate, cut through the data ‘noise’ and observe what matters most to their business.

The shift to digital-first business models to weather the storm and minimize the commercial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, has placed technologists at the forefront of their organizations’ response. According to this research, this forced a 3X acceleration of digital transformation projects. Unsurprisingly, technologists found themselves under considerable strain, with 89 percent reportedly feeling under immense pressure at work and 84 percent admitting to having difficulty switching off. Furthermore, many technologists expressed feeling frustrated about work (81 percent) and experiencing increased levels of conflict with colleagues (63 percent).

The new research goes on to highlight that rapid digital transformation has added staggering technical complexity throughout IT departments, with technologists listing the following factors as key contributors:

• A new set of priorities and challenges (80 percent).
• Technology sprawl and a patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies (78 percent).
• Acceleration to cloud computing (77 percent).
• Multiple, disconnected monitoring solutions (74 percent). 

This rise in IT complexity has significantly increased the amount of data created across the technology stack, from the application, through the infrastructure to the network and security. With this added complexity, 85 percent of technologists state that quickly cutting through noise caused by the ever-increasing volumes of data to identify root causes of performance issues will represent a significant challenge in the year ahead. With 75 percent of those polled stating they are already struggling to manage overwhelming ‘data noise’, technologists are desperate for a unified solution to enable real-time visibility across the entire IT estate:

• 95 percent of technologists say having visibility across the whole IT estate is important.
• 96 percent point to negative consequences of not having visibility and insights across the whole tech stack.

While most technologists acknowledge that the ability to monitor the IT stack is important, the overwhelming majority (92%) say the ability to link technology performance to business outcomes such as customer experience, sales transactions and revenue, will be what’s really important to delivering innovation goals over the next year. In addition, almost three quarters (73%) fear that the inability to link IT performance with business performance will be detrimental to their business in 2021, and 96 percent acknowledge that the ability to connect full-stack observability with real-time business outcomes will be essential to delivering first-class digital experiences and accelerating digital transformation.

Rather than searching through the vast amounts of telemetry data that comes with a standard full-stack observability approach, technologists recognize they need to observe what matters by applying a business lens to full-stack observability so they can surface the most impactful information quickly. This business context will enable them to make sense of what’s relevant and take action on the most transformative opportunities.

The report also highlights that while technologists are acutely aware that they need to contextualize IT performance with real-time business data, more than half (66%) do not have the resources and support they need, and 96 percent point to at least one barrier their organization must navigate in order to adopt this new approach.

The stakes have never been higher for technologists and their organizations to get the necessary resources and support in place, with three quarters (75%) of technologists saying their organization needs to connect full-stack observability to business outcomes within 12 months in order to remain competitive. 

To learn more about full-stack observability and the AppDynamics Business Observability platform, register to attend AppDynamics Transform 2021 virtual event starting today, or visit AppDynamics.comfor more information.

Other Resources:

• Download the latest installment of the AppDynamics Agents of Transformation research series here.
• Access free AppDynamics software and support through the COVID-19 Project Assist program.

Research Methodology

To better understand the complexity that technologists are facing in 2021 and to gauge understanding and appetite for full-stack observability with business context, Cisco AppDynamics has undertaken comprehensive global research, from board-level directors and CIOs, through to senior and mid-level IT management.

This research comprised of:

• Interviews with 1,050 IT professionals in organizations with a turnover of at least $500m.
• Interviews were conducted in 11 markets – Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States.
• Respondents worked across a range of industries, including IT, financial services, retail, public sector, manufacturing and automotive, and media and communications.
• All research was conducted by Insight Avenue in December 2020 and January 2021.

AppDynamics, a part of Cisco and the world’s #1 APM solution and full-stack, business-centric observability platform, today announced Cisco Secure Application, the industry’s first solution to drastically simplify vulnerability management, defend against attacks and protect applications – from the inside-out. Co-innovated with the Cisco Security business, the world’s largest enterprise security company, this new solution correlates security and application insights through a single solution. Built natively into the AppDynamics platform, users benefit from reduced alert fatigue, real time threat detection, and automatic breach prevention. The result is businesses’ confidence in application performance without the fear of significant damage to brand reputation and customer trust.

Organizations are increasingly reliant on applications to engage with and deliver services to customers, which leads to huge volumes of personal user data being housed within the application. As a result, organizations face increased vulnerability to cyber threats and security incidents. This challenge is further exacerbated as they continue to support more employees working from home who are using laptops and devices connected to the public internet. This is testing the limits of monitoring practices and vastly expanding the IT perimeter, creating new weaknesses and vulnerabilities in even the most secure IT estates. Failure to have the right processes and solutions in place to safeguard data housedin applications not only puts brand reputation and consumer trust at risk, but also may cost organizations millions of dollars in the event of a breach.

With applications now running anywhere from on-premise to multi-cloud and cloud-native microservices, combined with accelerated innovation, the need for an application-led approach to security is paramount. This critical shift will enable technologists to identify vulnerabilities within the application during production, correlate vulnerabilities and breaches with business impact, and bring together Application and Security teams to facilitate speedy remediation.

With Secure Application, IT teams will no longer sacrifice security for velocity. Secure Application is the only solution that uniquely brings together business performance and security insights with zero friction​ to protect brands against slowdowns and exploits.

With Secure Application, enterprise IT teams will have access to:

• Automatic runtime protection: Visibility into an application’s true behavior to easily detect attacks, identify deviations, and block attacks automatically.

• Simplified vulnerability management: Access at the code level to detect dependency and configuration level security vulnerabilities in production.

• Security insights informed by business impact: Security details correlated with the application topology to apply business relevance to security events and helps teams focus on the incidents that matter most.

• Collaboration between Application and Security teams: Shared context for Application and Security teams for optimal collaboration, improved security posture, and healthy digital business.

AppDynamics with Cisco Secure Application is currently accessible through early availability. Learn more about Secure Application here.

Cisco AppDynamics today announced its intent to acquire enterprise software company, Dashbase for its logs and events analytics technology. Dashbase will add to AppDynamics observability capabilities and the integration of Dashbase’s logs and events analytics technology into the Cisco AppDynamics platform will enable customers to accelerate their digital transformation by unifying and taming the complexity of data across technology, user and business domains. 

To learn more, you can read this blog post by AppDynamics GM, Linda Tong.

AppDynamics, a part of Cisco, and the world’s #1 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution and full-stack, business centric observability platform, is partnering with Jobvite to save the company several hours per incident by simplifying its debugging processes and accelerating the mean time to repair (MTTR) for software bugs or errors.

Jobvite, an applicant tracking system (ATS) and recruiting software serving customers in many different industries, selected AppDynamics APM to migrate mission critical applications such as Recruiting and Canvas to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Because of the competitive HR market and how essential it is to ensure a flawless digital customer experience, Jobvite needed a way to scale its digital platforms to meet an increase in usage of millions of job seekers and recruiters using Jobvite every year and thousands of customers who rely on the applications daily. To do this, Jobvite partnered with AppDynamics to enable a seamless migration to AWS without any disruption to their end users. After successfully transitioning to their cloud-native microservice architecture, Jobvite turned to AppDynamics to manage and monitor its multiple AWS-based applications, including the company’s popular customer facing applications. More recently, Jobvite added observability to gain access to Deep Code Insights powered by Rookout.

By partnering with AppDynamics, Jobvite can pinpoint functionality issues in production, eliminating the time previously wasted sifting through log files, saving hours per incident. AppDynamics has allowed Jobvite to detect any issues early in development and resolve them before they impact customers. By providing deep performance insights at every stage of the software development lifecycle—from code insights through to production—Jobvite has accelerated innovation by bringing high-quality products to market faster. AppDynamics has allowed Jobvite to shift left and get the most important products to market faster, while still delivering the high-quality standards that the market expects.

Since partnering with AppDynamics, Jobvite has been able to make vast improvements, including:

• Migrating all workloads to AWS within six months and with zero disruption to the end user.
• Simplifying production debugging and rapid root-cause analysis to optimize application performance.
• Democratizing secure access to the product runtime behavior in any environment, empowering teams to take ownership from development to delivery and accelerating MTTR for software bugs or errors.
• Improving management of unplanned work, allowing IT teams to maintain a strategic focus and allocate resources to support business objectives.

To learn more about how to move quickly and securely to AWS with AppDynamics full-stack performance monitoring, visit here.

To visit the AppDynamics virtual booth at AWS re:Invent, through December 18, 2020, registered attendees can click here.