As a consultancy that specialises in the entire IT lifecycle, Avocado understands the importance of mitigating challenges related to risk and reputation for our clients. In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, continuous insights and improvement are necessary at every stage of the IT lifecycle. This is where observability comes in. Observability is crucial for the constant change impacting organisations. Observability provides a single consolidated view of the health of systems that can predict known problems before they occur.
Since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought about unprecedented changes, organisations have been pushed to adapt to economic and geopolitical turmoil, climate change, and cyber threats. Since then, resilience has become a key theme, and observability plays a vital role in helping organisations prepare for whatever may come next, along with the here and now.
At a micro level, organisations are becoming more complex due to the number of applications and hybrid environments that exist across an enterprise. Organisations are operating and maintaining hundreds of internally developed or managed business applications, both on the public cloud and on-premises. And while some are using cloud-native architecture, many are still reliant on legacy or monolithic architectures to manage their risk and protect their reputation. Additionally, with most organisations making heavy use of SaaS platforms to provide key business functions – the typical IT landscape becomes even more complex.
Observability cuts through the complexity, provides increased visibility and unifies monitoring across different environments. As well as being a catalyst for organisations to rethink their approach to doing business resiliently in a changing world…
It’s time to change, to think differently, and to embrace observability as a necessary practice!
Gone are the days of segregated visibility; in today’s complex environments, complete end-to-end visibility is essential. Having a single source of truth, where everyone can reference the same information, allows organisations to respond faster to risks and protect their reputation. Observability provides the ability to know where to look, who to engage and, extends to automation and self-healing processes, enabling organisations to trailblaze and constantly think differently.
We solve our clients’ complex challenges with tailored observability solutions and classify them into four key pillars; In our experience, organisations have the potential to positively impact performance, customer experience, quality and security across the whole IT lifecycle.
Let’s dive a little deeper into these four pillars and how they impact risk, reputation and revenue.
Observability Enhances Performance
Observability provides a unified view of an application’s health and performance, offering deep insights into customer experience and service performance. By providing the information needed to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and identify root causes of issues, organisations can continually optimise their services. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation, observability enables a comprehensive understanding of areas of risk and opportunities for improvement, ultimately enhancing the overall performance.
Some examples of observability solutions where Avocado are enhancing performance include application performance monitoring down to the method level in the code stacks that our clients are developing.
Observability Improves Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) is a critical factor in an organisation’s success. Observability plays a significant role in gaining a better understanding of the end-to-end customer journey, which leads to mitigating risks, improved reputation, and a competitive advantage. By closely monitoring and analysing customer interactions and service performance, organisations can identify pain points, broken functionality, and excessive lag in applications. Observability empowers organisations to deliver exceptional customer experiences, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Some examples of observability solutions where Avocado are helping clients for a greater CX include working with clients who want to map their users’ journeys through their applications to get a better understanding of usage patterns and eliminate broken click paths and optimise load times.
Observability Drives Quality
Building quality into everything an organisation does is essential for maintaining a strong reputation and market presence. Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring and focuses on all aspects to provide a holistic view, and help organisations better understand the end user and identify areas where quality can be improved.
By continuously monitoring and analysing data, organisations can gain assurance, mitigate risks, and drive continuous improvement. Observability allows organisations to protect their reputation and accelerate time to market by proactively addressing potential quality issues before they impact customers.
Some examples of observability solutions where Avocado are helping clients improve quality include enhancing CI/CD pipelines by deploying observability practices and providing better tracking and oversight of commits, merges and releases, ensuring sprints are successfully delivered.
Observability Enhances Security
In today’s threat landscape, organisations must have real-time visibility into their IT infrastructure, systems and operations to identify, protect and respond to cyber-attacks. Observability provides the necessary visibility to detect and respond to security threats. To create a comprehensive threat hunting capability or to ensure compliance, it is necessary to pull together data from all available systems, for example endpoint protection systems, access control, infrastructure health metrics, etc. By closely monitoring user and system behaviour, analysing logs and traces, and leveraging advanced security monitoring tools, organisations can strengthen their security controls and protect sensitive data.
Some examples of observability where Avocado is helping clients include building the tools needed for security monitoring for example: SIEM and SOAR, centrally managed endpoint protection tools, Identity Access Management (IAM), Privileged Access Management (PAM) and many others.
Taking this a step further, Avocado can help clients leverage the security outputs from all their solutions and tools to provide advanced threat hunting capabilities, deep insights into their security posture and standardised compliance reporting to strengthen threat and risk management activities.
Final thoughts
Observability is essential for organisations seeking to thrive in today’s dynamic business landscape. It serves as a crucial element that strengthens the pillars of performance, customer experience, quality, and security, all of which significantly impact an organisation’s risk management, reputation, and revenue generation. Avocado helps organisations adopt observability solutions to safeguard their market and guarantee sustainable success. We solve unique organisational challenges to unlock valuable insights, proactively manage risks, and continuously enhance operations. If you are looking at embarking, or maturing your observability journey, our team professionals can conduct a discovery, analysis, and report on your environment to create a roadmap to a fully observable system. Contact our team to learn more.
