The OpsRamp Monitor captures the latest buzz around what’s trending in the world of ITOps and related technology, and October saw some significant news, including Facebook’s unprecedented outage. Let’s dig in.
Facebook Outage Exposes Fragile SDN Networks
The internet will not forget Oct 4, 2021, as a massive 6-hour outage took down social media giant Facebook and its subsidiaries Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram. An event that shook the online world and took us back to the pre-social media days, albeit for a few hours, Facebook watched rather helplessly as users started flocking to Twitter and Telegram. The outage was caused by the loss of IP routes to the Facebook Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which were all self-hosted at the time.
Experts believe the outage exposed the possibility for disruption when the control plane is centralized and segregated from the network devices. The outage also caused massive financial repercussions, as shares in the company dropped by nearly 5% and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's wealth fell by more than $6 billion. The outage cost Facebook nearly $100m in ad revenue, according to an analysis by Fortune.
“The important lesson here is that as we evolve networks to be more intelligent through centralizing the control plane or to be more efficient through automation, we need to make sure that suitable network observability is installed.” - ITOps Times
IT Budgets Are Rising Faster - Gartner Survey
A recent Gartner survey predicts that IT budgets will increase 2% this year and 3.6% in 2022. The findings are based on a global survey of almost 2,400 CIO and technology executives across industries. The increase in budget is linked to several efforts by companies to become more integrated and business-flexible. The top three investment categories are:
- Business Intelligence and Data Analytics - 51%
- Cloud platforms - 48%
- Integration Technologies and APIs - 36%
Given the rise of cyber threats in recent times, Infosecurity and cybersecurity unsurprisingly remain high priorities with two-thirds of executives planning to invest in these technologies. Executives also agree that the focus has increased more towards delivering customer satisfaction and giving customers an integrated experience rather than merely execution metrics such as on-time IT delivery. Gartner believes this is the way forward and organizations that are more adaptable and flexible will reap the rewards.
“A customer doesn’t care how fast we rack a server. They care how fast can you deliver this integrated service to us that has all the stuff we need” - Cris Ross, CIO, Mayo Clinic
Generative AI, Cloud Native Platforms, Hyperautomation - The Top Strategic Technology Trends In 2022 Are Here
It was a busy month for Gartner, which also identified the top strategic technologyl trends for the year 2022. Gartner believes these trends are here to stay and expects them to act as force-multipliers of digital business and innovation in the next 3 to 5 years. The themes of this year’s trends are three-fold - engineering trust, sculpting change and accelerating growth.
Gartner says these 12 strategic trends will help CEOs deliver growth and efficiency. It also believes the role of CIO’s as strategic partners will be solidified as a result.
- Generative AI
- Hyperautomation
- Data Fabric
- Cybersecurity Mesh
- Cloud-Native Platforms
- Composable Applications
- Privacy-Enhancing Computation
- Decision Intelligence
- AI Engineering
- Distributed Enterprises
- Autonomic Systems
- Total Experience
SolarWinds Hackers Threat Still Very Much Alive - Microsoft
In an advisory,Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust Tom Burt has said that the threat of SolarWinds hackers group Nobelium is still very much alive with at least 140 resellers and technology service providers in global IT supply chains targeted in recent months. The group was responsible for the SolarWinds breach in December 2020.
Microsoft believes this latest campaign is a part of wider activities. Between July 1 and October 19, Microsoft has warned 609 customers of 22,868 hacking attempts. The focus, however, is not on any specific security flaws. Microsoft believes the group is relying on ‘spray-and-pray credential stuffing, phishing, API abuse, and token theft etc.
"This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and [to] establish a mechanism for surveilling -- now or in the future -- targets of interest to the Russian government," - Microsoft
Here’s how OpsRamp is responding to cyberthreats.
European businesses will invest between €2.4 and €3.3 billion in automation to boost productivity - Forrester Study
2020 saw Europe spend a total of €1.88 billion in employee productivity automation tools, and Forrester believes the region will increase its investment in automation in 2022 as a measure to boost productivity. It estimates the growth in 2022 to be at about 33% for robotic process automation (RPA) and 13% for digital process automation (DPA). Interestingly, analysts predict the investment in 2022 will focus on lower-wage sectors like retail and hospitality.
OpsRamp has responded to this market demand within the European market and has recently signed a partnership with Nordic giant TietoEVRY. TietoEVRY will integrate the OpsRamp platform as the “DigiOps” foundation of its Next-Gen Enterprise Services offering, providing a digital operations management backbone that’s more automated and more intelligent.
We want to provide a holistic management solution across different hyperscalers, whatever our customers are using. OpsRamp supports all of those environments and allows us to create that holistic offering for our customers.”
- Jani Hyppönen, TietoEVRY
Next Steps:
- Report: The Total Business Impact Of IT Performance
- OpsRamp Featured In Eight Gartner Hype-Cycles
- Schedule A Custom Demo With An OpsRamp Solution Expert.