Why we need the same IT visibility in the Cloud as pilots and passengers expect when they fly.
As I prepare for my latest trip out to the U.A.E. to help clients with cloud migration and application performance management, I read a very interesting article about Emirates and their latest A380 order. Whilst the airline industry is generally in crisis, Emirates and the A380 seems to go from strength to strength and this is best demonstrated by the fact that Emirates are just taking delivery of their latest “super 380’s” which will fly even more passengers.
For those of you who have flown with Emirates on board the A380 you will know that whether you fly business or economy (and I have done both) the experience is fantastic. I have to confess that I am a bit of a plane geek and the A380 is in my view the best passenger plane to fly on. In addition to its size it has some really advanced analytics and pilot controls which apparently makes it easy to fly particularly on take-off and landing.
During one of my recent trips back from Dubai I remember taking off in heavy cloud and rain and I remember thinking how as passengers, we place our faith in the pilots and technology to see through and beyond the cloud. I then moved to thinking how I would feel as a CIO if I was taking a journey into the cloud without being able to see a thing. I’m not sure that many users would feel very safe if they were being told that it was being done with a “wing and a prayer”.
Download our cloud ebook here
This I am afraid is all too often the reality when IT leaders try and find a way of delivering end-to-end service management using cloud services. Far too often CIO’s are trying to define a cloud strategy without including the deep analytics and performance management information. I’m not sure that I would want to fly in any aeroplane that had no navigation system and the pilot was “blind” for most of the flight. All too often the CIO is placed in a difficult position which is often down to the cloud and managed service providers. The service providers don’t want their customers to be able to see inside their own operations as this could be perceived as them “hanging out their own dirty washing”. So the analytics provided are very often poor or non-existent or at best so complicated that it takes a PhD to understand them.
Going back to my A380 analogy, I am not sure that I would want to entrust my safety to pilots with no navigation in the same way CIOs have to in order to deliver digital transformation into the cloud. The disappointing thing is that there are plenty of great tools out there, but the data is in silos and generally the teams don’t share it very well, which means that the poor old CIO really does have to very often “fly blind”.
How Does Stratiam Allow You To Visualise The Cloud?
Which is why we produced Stratiam, which gives the CIO that clarity and visibility across the whole IT estate. Our solution doesn’t care if you are delivering a private or public cloud or trying to see your end-to-end service across the Internet in multiple locations. Stratiam provides you with that single pane of glass and empowers the CIO to see into the cloud regardless of location or service provider. That means that the CIO has less sleepless nights and delivers a much better service to the user.
Which brings me back to my flight tomorrow. I know that I will have a great experience on board the Emirates A380 out of Heathrow. At Intergence we believe that the technology to give IT users the same quality experience is out there as CIOs start their own digital journeys. Stratiam can really help ensure that however complicated that digital journey is across the infrastructure, the users will ultimately gain a much better and more reliable experience even as they fly through the clouds.