We may associate October with a good fright, given that the month culminates with Halloween, but there are less conventional things to worry about as well. One of the focal areas is with computerized systems and digital data.
This includes various IT problems that commonly impact upon business performance and profitability.
To explore these themes, Digital Journal spoke with Randy Randhawa, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Virtana (a unified observability platform for migrating, optimizing, and managing application workloads).
Randhawa shares with readers the “top 5 scariest or haunt-worthy IT issues”. These are based around cloud migration and management. These are (and appropriately themed for the ghostly season):
- Fear of the unknown: New tools, new problems to deal with.
- Ghosts in the cloud: Making bad choices – the wrong strategy, tool, apps to migrate, or selecting the wrong cloud service provider for workloads.
- Ghastly mistakes: Missing a step in the migration process, like a key dependency.
- Zombie like performance issues: Not being able to report on the huge spend to transform/migrate and unable to analyze and report on metrics that are meaningful to the business.
- Cloud of horrors: Incurring unknown or unexpected costs, overcommitting on reservations, Underestimating performance impacts.
Randhawa goes on to provides some tips on how to best manage the multi-headed cloud beast: “Digital transformation has become real in the last 12-24 months for most companies but it’s a journey because IT is never one and done.”
He clarifies that: “The function of IT is to leverage technology to solve business problems, but you can never ignore the human element within that. The biggest impediment to digital transformation is the human aspect.”
This is as much cultural as it is technological, Randhawa explains: “Change is all about disruption and that is often scary for the people involved. In order to quell that fear, keep everyone informed and constantly communicate with them so that they understand the goal of the business transformation and take ownership of the changes.”
Furthermore, this “Involves retraining and pushing people from their comfort zone. If you arm people with more information – they can make the right decision and remove some of the fear of the unknown.”
