The Operations Squeeze

Throughout the years, I have had the chance to talk to many customers, from many industries, many sizes and in many different parts of the world. There is a common denominator to all of them when it comes to operations: the challenge to operate IT in a world where DevOps and Legacy coexist, in a world where applications that are built in 3 months become part of the IT catalog for 20 years. Real life ops are brownfield scenarios, where there is an existing and growing tool & software sprawl. The complexity and heterogeneity of the IT catalog of any given enterprise is a growing pain to the operations teams.

Digital transformation is a process that moves at a much slower pace than innovation, and while there are some obvious benefits in embracing the new paradigms for starting initiatives, the reality is that no company has the need, will or ability (read budget if you want) to refactor their vast legacy IT into this new world, and even if they did, there would still be an operational burden associated with the process that falls into an already stretched team.

Operations organizations in today’s enterprises are finding themselves squeezed between two unrelenting forces. On one side there are the business-driven demands of DevOps and Digital Transformation (“Go faster! Open things up!). On the other side, there are the demands to maximize security and stability (“Don’t be the next hack! Don’t be the next outage! Lock things down!”). And there, in the middle, is an already over-burdened Operations organization doing their best to avoid being squeezed beyond the breaking point. How do we consolidate this growing operational burden into our existing processes and governance? How are we able to keep efficient operations in a heterogeneous, diverse environment?

To take on this challenge, these organizations are turning into Self-Service operations to lower their support costs while simultaneously increasing their responsiveness and agility. A concept introduced by Rundeck, a platform for IT Operators - the unsung heroes of modern business- built to let operations run more efficiently, scale faster, and maintain security without the need to replace your existing systems. Rundeck will effectively integrate with your existing tools and provide the glue to automate your operations across all your tasks, independent of the software used, managing the entire Ops spectrum, from mainframe to cloud to containers,

So if you are looking at providing an end to end remediation system (automating diagnose, escalation and repair), or integrating all your scheduling jobs on a single pane of glass, or operationalizing a multi-platform provisioning system, Rundeck can help. Try Rundeck here, the Swiss army knife for Ops.

Happy to be helping these operations teams take on this challenge. I am joining Rundeck as their Vice President of Services. Stay tuned