The Complexity Conundrum

by Sue Dunnell.

Excited to exploit the many benefits of the cloud, IT teams often jump in with both feet and start migrating workloads and applications.

Typically, they’ll identify what they believe to be low-complexity workloads to move first or assume a lift and shift approach will accelerate their ability to quickly move legacy applications. And sometimes they make a lot of progress right away, feeling confident about hitting target goals for cloud adoption ahead of schedule.

But then one of two things happen: They realize that an application with a web front end is sharing a server with dozens of other applications of varying importance to business. And some of those mobile workloads have dependencies on services they had been unaware of.

If lucky, these dependencies are exposed during a planning session; if not, they are identified only after trying to restore service and after bringing down business apps.

Understanding the Complexity of Your Environment

Underestimating the complexity of your environment can be costly to business but, on the other hand, being overly fearful of the complexity of their environment and getting trapped in “analysis paralysis” is risky too. Of course, it’s wise to approach making changes carefully because most organizations don’t have the ability to understand interdependencies across all their applications, workloads, service, and servers. Many are unaware of assets being used by different business units since data about different applications and servers is often stored in disparate tools with different purposes.

Analysis Paralysis

Getting stuck in a state of analysis paralysis is highly unproductive and can significantly stall progress on strategic IT initiatives.

And there lies the conundrum — both underestimating and overestimating complexity. To accelerate and make smart decisions, organizations need to understand their environments and systematically approach every initiative with the ability to anticipate the end state. Knowledge is power, and understanding the interdependencies across complex, hybrid environments puts IT in control, able to execute and mitigate risk at the same time.

We built TransitionManager to do just that.

TransitionManager is a web-based, collaboration platform for managing and accelerating IT transformation. It offers unique value with its visual, interactive map of all assets, and interdependencies with an application-level focus.

This enables business users across the enterprise to centrally plan and orchestrate cloud migrations and other IT initiatives across complex, hybrid, IT environments. Dynamically generated runbooks sequence the execution of human and automated tasks and ensure transformation activities occur in the correct order, minimizing risk of outages and ensuring application level resilience.

Understand the complexity of your environment and you can move your organization forward with confidence.

Yes, the solution itself may require deeper knowledge, some hard thinking and collaboration across both the technology and the business sides of the organization. But in the end that means that your organization will really understand things and together, solve the complexity conundrum.