The case to refresh Australian business’ digital mindset

Friday, 11 February 2022 00:39

The case to refresh Australian business’ digital mindset

By Mike Hicks, ThousandEyes

Mike Hicks, Principal Solutions Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes

GUEST OPINION BY Mike Hicks, Principal Solutions Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes:  Digital experience suffered some setbacks last year as service provider outages resulted in a trail of collateral damage, but it also showed organisations how to negotiate a way forward,.

It’s fair to say that outages shook up the digital landscape in 2021. For instance, the Akamai, AWS and Fastly disruptions rendered a range of large companies and services inaccessible.

That, in turn, left us with vital lessons for minimising downtime and preventing service degradation in the New Year.

In my mind, there are three vital lessons worth calling out.

The first of those lessons is to communicate contextually across internal silos to speed up incident response.

For many organisations, downtime means damaged revenue, reputation and wasted resources - think 100-person war rooms - responding to incidents.

Many of us have lived through these kinds of war rooms, urgently called in response to degraded customer experiences due to a performance or availability problem with a key application.

In siloed organisations in particular, the size of these war rooms can quickly balloon as different internal functions and external providers are brought in to collectively work through a degradation or outage scenario.

At that point it becomes an issue of whether these war rooms constitute time and money well-spent.

Having 100 experienced heads on a war room call can cost in excess of $50,000 an hour. Avoiding a costly war room scenario spares engineering resources diverting from more useful strategic functions.

But there’s also a balance to be struck, because the downtime itself also has a cost.

Estimated costs in this area vary wildly.

A Gartner figure of $5600 per minute, extrapolating to $300,000 per hour is frequently cited; however, it is from 2014 and from a distinctly data centre-centric era. Business IT environments are now in a different place - more cloud-centric and internet-reliant.

One might realistically expect the cost of downtime would be less, in line with reduced cost overheads and operating expenses. A recent report pegged the cost of downtime per hour on average to be $84,650; which is still, as that report notes, a significant financial impact.

So what is the right balance and how are organisations achieving it?

Introducing better visibility across operational silos - internal and external - is one of the primary ways that organisations are lowering the cost and resource-intensiveness of network and application-based incident response.

Better visibility starts with the end user’s digital experience. It is important to understand what end users see: how they experience a digital service, and all the different paths they might take to reach it. By having this visibility and dynamically understanding it, it is possible to recognise network or application-related problems that may be (or are) disrupting the digital experience.

Visibility is also about insight into the broader ecosystem and the critical interdependencies between systems and providers needed to create an end-to-end digital experience. A digital service delivery chain can rely on multiple dependencies to operate, so understanding all these dependencies, even indirect or "hidden" ones along with external services, is critical.

It is then important to have a correlated view of all of this information. This allows you to better understand where an issue sits, and isolate it to a problematic domain. At that point, a data-driven ‘common language’ can occur and discussions to determine a way forward can proceed.

A shared view of this intelligence across teams produces a much more collaborative and efficient approach to incident resolution. It not only makes identifying issues more straightforward and efficient; it’s also easier to engage the appropriate team (or external provider) much faster to drive towards a resolution, without unnecessarily bringing all teams together into a war room scenario.

When issues arise - and they will continue to do so in 2022, whether with a provider you’re directly doing business with or with a downstream provider your ISP is doing business with - when you escalate with context and with visibility, and you can readily share that context, it goes a long way to maintaining digital experience and keeping end users connected and productive.

In the current context of remote and hybrid work, where we rely on a range of third-party provided tools, systems and services, it also makes sense to have an independent and holistic view of the environment and of the real-world digital experience it is outputting in real time as assurance that the service (and service levels) you’re paying for are being delivered.

Outside of visibility, a second lesson from the outages of 2021 is to use practical design for redundancy.

Organisations may wish to consider leveraging more than one provider for critical services such as CDN and DNS. However, just as with incident response, the costs of doing so need to be balanced against the impact of downtime. By leveraging multiple providers, an automated recovery process may allow the organisation to route around a problem and recover their service with limited impact, avoiding any period of going ‘dark’.

The third lesson to call out is that organisations should build out a contingency playbook, because even if you've implemented best practices and redundant service architectures, you may still encounter unforeseen failures.

The outages of 2021 were significant and some of them even set new records, lasting hours upon hours As we increasingly come to rely on the Internet and other third-party providers, we’re sure to see more large outages this year. With end-to-end visibility that allows you to quickly see when and where outages and disruptions occur along the entire delivery chain to your users, and a playbook to address failure scenarios, you can minimise downtime and the risk of performance degradation of your services.

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