The Four Components of Modern Operations You Must Have

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As companies began accelerating the transition towards modern applications years ago, many failed to appreciate the need to upgrade their operations as well. This is now where the emphasis is being directed. That’s because development and operations go hand in hand. You will never get the full benefit of your modern applications environment without Modern Operations to support it all. At Evolving Solutions, we talk about the four essential components of Modern Operations:

• Data Access and Connectivity
• Data Availability and Protection
• Observability
• Automation and Pipelines

Let’s look at the roles that each of these essential critical components in today’s modern operation environments.

Automation and Pipelines

We start here because the end goal is to create an automated pipeline that feeds new innovative code into your business applications that creates value. You want the pipeline to be as developer-friendly as possible because the developers are your innovators. They are doing the magic. Whatever you can do to automate configuration and deployment processes just makes their job easier. What you want to today is the ability to develop infrastructure as code. Your pipelines serve as automated software distribution systems to deliver your software. Automation and pipelines allows you to take full advantage of the APIs between your different operational systems, thus increasing the flexibility of your applications as well.

Observability

In our experience, observability is one of the two components where we find the greatest knowledge gaps within companies today. On the surface that seems contrary to what you might think. After all, network teams have been monitoring data center systems for decades. There lies the problem, however. Modern applications reside in the cloud, not on-premise. Monitoring infers that someone is there to monitor the monitoring process for alerts and other significant events. Unfortunately, the ecosphere that supports cloud applications is far too dynamic and complex for the traditional “dashboard and alert” monitoring process. Observability is a holistic approach that provides insights into the behavior of the system or application, not just events. These insights hasten the troubleshooting process which in some cases, can initiate automated fixes, totally sidestepping the traditional reliance on human intervention.

Data Availability and Protection

This is another weak link for many organizations because while traditional infrastructure teams are well versed in securing the assets that reside in their data centers, they are less familiar with protection and backup methodologies when it comes to the cloud. We aren’t hosting applications on virtual machines anymore that are protected by traditional backup and recovery solutions.  They now reside in containers, and while containers offer spectacular levels of agility, they are also more vulnerable. After all, they are built from application code and rely on configuration files. Data protection is really about resilience. It’s about building a resistant application environment to ensure that the right data is available for the right services. While data availability and protection is all about getting the strategies in place to make sure your data is secure from malicious attack and ensure that backups are implanted in a way that allows it to be recovered quickly, it would be a mistake to only think about security just within the context of this single component. You must deal with security within each of the four quadrants.

Data Access and Connectivity

Data access and connectivity is the backbone of data center operations and remains so for Modern Operations as well. It is just a lot more complicated as all your assets are distributed across an expansive IT estate that includes your data center, public cloud, SaaS application or third-party hosting provider. Now factor in the users that are also distributed across multiple geographic locations. In other words, there aren’t any hard boundaries anymore and it’s those boundaries that made security and visibility a lot easier. This is where security comes into play again because data is being moved amongst all these touch points and you must have the right security strategies in place to protect data while in transit and at rest, wherever that might be. Of course, you can no longer measure access and connectivity with a simple ping anymore as you could a server in the data center. This again is where real time data and insights come into play and that is where observability comes into play. There is a synergy between all these components.

Our Services at Evolving Solutions

At Evolving Solutions, we’ve been helping clients across a variety of industries make their full transition to modern applications and operations from the beginning. This broad experience provides us insight into transformation and Modern Operations from a first-hand experience. We have witnessed the value of breaking the siloed nature that development teams and operations have traditionally had in place and helping them adapt to new disciplines and mature their practices. Contact me if you would like to discuss how to drive better business outcomes with a Modern Operations approach.