What we can learn from Formula 1 teaches in the race for clean, safe software
By Gerardo Barranquero, CEO.
Gartner tell us that the key differentiator when deciding to buy goods and services is customer experience, even over price.
Under the IT lens, the traditional question was ‘do we release software fast but buggy, or slow but clean?’ The worldwide adoption of iterative development has answered this – concluding that speed matters.
But a new consideration has entered the race – security. Customers want a great experience that is safe!
Why fast and safe software matters
Think of it like this, for the Australian Formula 1 race in Melbourne, it’s better to start with a car that is competitive and improve it over the life of the race until it’s burning up the racetrack, than to show up with the fastest car one week after the race was run!
The evolution of automation frameworks and tools has also helped businesses deliver new features quickly and defect free. The challenge now is to do it securely, protecting the sensitive customer data stored in our systems.
Gone are the days when manual efforts kept pace with threat detection and alert triaging. The volume and complexity of cyber threats has grown exponentially, and the recent high profile cyber-attacks showed that every business is at risk, regardless of size.
Winning the race to be fast, safe and secure
The volume of data and threats processed requires an unprecedented level of capacity, capability, and sophistication. Industry leading organisations are using security platforms and risk based alerting strategies to ensure the software they release is safe and secure.
During a Formula 1 race, the amount of telemetry coming from a race car is mind blowing. Every inch of the race car is monitored to ensure a clean race and driver safety. The F1 McLaren team uses Splunk to monitor performance and make real time, data driven, decisions during the race. Using Splunk, the McLaren team eliminates the guesswork and pit crews use rich, live data to streamline the race car’s performance and their own operations.
Like the McLaren team, IT teams use Splunk to ensure their operations are safe and secure. Software released to customers must be free of vulnerabilities to protect against cyber threats. Having first mover advantage and clean software delivered quickly and safely will always defeat a superior product delivered late and unsafely.
Reducing manual effort reduces human error. Creating an automated continuous integration, delivery, testing, and deployment capability eliminates guesswork by reducing manual, error prone, activities. Automation enables frequent, small, software deployments where defects are easily identified and mean time to resolution is low.
Monitoring performance at every turn
With Splunk, IT teams monitor threats from humans and hardware, with interactive dashboards that support drilldown investigations and prioritise alert based on their potential to impact the crown jewels.
In Formula 1, the crown jewel is the driver, with all efforts focused on a safe race first, and a win second. Similarly, in IT, a great customer experience that exposes customer data, resulting in irreparable brand damage cannot be offset by the new features.
Hardware failures severely impact the customer experience. Hardware cannot be trusted not to fail. Every Formula 1 fan knows that the race leader is always at risk of mechanical failure despite making all the right decisions. Proactive monitoring for signs of performance degradation and responsive mitigation and replacement strategies are vital for long term success.
Successful IT companies proactively monitor their infrastructure. Splunk dashboards alert IT teams to threats, malicious or otherwise, and automatically activate the redundancy and scalability built into infrastructure solutions. Cloud technology has made hardware disposable, replaceable and scalable. Monitoring the customer experience and application performance across the infrastructure is vital for success.
We don’t know who will win the Australian Formula 1 race in Melbourne, but in the IT race fast, safe, and secure software, automation and security platforms like Splunk will win every time!
Do you want your teams to be like the F1 pit crew and win the race to be fast, safe, and secure? Contact us to learn more about our software development and testing services and how we incorporate tools like Splunk today.
