Embracing technology initiatives in the digital era has pushed organizations to align with changing business needs and do more with less. Enterprises need to better understand their changing customer expectations around new features, reliability, resilience, security, and quality. Customers demand the most innovative services and easy-to-use applications, and have zero tolerance for slow application response.

In today’s volatile market, customers expect that the services/applications should be available and run efficiently as per their demand. Therefore, regardless of how an organization stacks up new features to applications with regards to its competitors, customers will always choose a more resilient and reliable service over a function-rich one. This clearly indicates that no feature is more important than reliability.

COVID-19 has pushed companies over the tipping point of technology and has transformed businesses forever. Digital adoption has taken a quantum leap at both the organizational and industry levels in a post-pandemic world. According to a recent McKinsey Global Survey of executives, the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the digitization of customer interactions with 80% of customer interactions today being digital in nature.

Enterprises are focused on accelerating their digitization journey in the present as well as in the post-COVID-19 future. A few noteworthy aspects are as follows:

• Adoption of modern-age infrastructure remains at an all-time high
• They are struggling to find an optimal balance between the scale of operations and the cost of running them
• Resilience is becoming one of the critical aspects for business success

The ramifications of the pandemic have forced many businesses to see how they can scale back their operations. Therefore, organizations are looking for ways to maintain customer loyalty and address their needs along with innovating and maintaining reliable operations.

Ramifications of a non-resilient, unreliable system are huge

Enterprises using unreliable applications/services can have adverse consequences and need to proactively invest to make their operations more reliable. Therefore, organizations are looking for ways to minimize customer churn rates and address their needs, along with innovating and transforming themselves. Enterprises cannot afford any kind of outages and glitches in IT operations which can cost them financially and further lead to a deficit in customer trust.

According to an IDC survey of Fortune 1000 companies:

• The average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour
• The average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion

Strengthen your business by incubating reliability and resiliency with SRE

Typically, organizations have always focused on features first and reliability later. With enterprises embarking on their digitization/cloud-native journey, it’s very important for them to bake in reliability principles and reliability-based features into their cloud platforms, otherwise they will reach a tipping point beyond which they cannot scale. Also, it’s critical for enterprises to maintain an optimum balance between speed and agility in getting new application/product features to the market. For that, organizations need to maximize their reliability and the quality of infrastructure needed to provide those features consistently and safely to the customer.

Innovation is another aspect that gets adversely impacted if teams are always struggling to keep the systems running due to time spent on adding new features without paying attention to reliability and/or resilience. The ultimate goal for any enterprise is not to merely push the software to production, but to run and manage it efficiently and effectively once it’s live, by enhancing the overall service reliability. Site reliability engineering (SRE) accomplishes the reliability and resilience aspect by integrating development and engineering best practices into the infrastructure and operation of services. Site reliability engineering or SRE methodology is that which fuses software and operations teams, with the goal of producing reliable, resilient, and scalable systems by adopting an engineering mindset.  Some of the core principles of SRE are:

• Architecting resilience
• Embracing failure as a learning opportunity
• Advocating the reduction of toil through automation
• Cultivating a blame-aware culture

SRE brings a robust combination of multiple tenets that needs attention for a resilient and reliable environment such as the golden signals, toil reductions, impactful automations, blameless postmortem, and a blameless culture within teams to eradicate siloed operations and identify the root cause(s) of any issues for both predictive as well as reactive measures.

Key business outcomes of SRE     

There are both tangible and non-tangible benefits of having a resilient, reliable, and sustainable environment. While the potential to achieve tangible and measurable business outcomes are huge, the non-tangible benefits are even greater. Early adopters of SRE have experienced the following  key benefits:

• Toil reduction
• Faster identification of production issues
• Higher developer productivity
• Improvement and efficiency in monitoring alerts
• Higher availability

Other business benefits of SRE are:

• Maximized visibility and control around business process and KPIs
• Improved performance and capacity issues
• Induction of a cultural transformation by collaboration with the business development and operations teams
• Converting IT operations from the cost center to the value center
• Increased release agility by automating deployments and the rollback process
• A resilient environment for applications and platforms by maximizing automation and blameless quick Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

HCLTech CARE: Your one-stop resiliency and reliability partner

While the world has shifted from on-premises datacenters to cloud, from traditional Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methods to Agile, from work in office to work from anywhere among other changes, organizations need to be always available to better serve their customers. More than an organizational wish or preference, it has become a pressing need to be reliable and sustainable in all business operations.

HCLTech Cloud Smart and its emerging HCLTech CARE (Cloud Application Reliability Engineering) framework helps its customers fulfill their need to increase the overall reliability of their cloud-native ecosystem and resilience across all platform/application services. Consequently, this improves business-aligned modern operations. HCLTech CARE brings value to the operations by leveraging a well-defined set of practices and principles, and a culture built on Site Reliability Engineering(SRE)/ Platform Reliability Engineering (PRE) and DevOps foundations with strong emphasis on reliability engineering capabilities. It helps enterprises accelerate business transformation and maximize value by delivering reliable services that meets customer expectations.  

Learn more about HCLTech Cloud Smart: https://www.hcltech.com/CloudSmart