Data from cloud-native stacks too hard to manage - report

Dynatrace has released the results of an independent global survey showing that current solutions do not have the capacity to garner meaningful insights from data generated by cloud-native architectures.

The 2022 Global CIO report, How to Tame the Data Explosion and Overcome the Complexity of the Cloud, has been conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by Dynatrace.

It surveyed 1,303 CIOs and senior cloud and IT operations managers in large enterprises.

78% of the Australian respondents, of which there were 100, said the increase in data produced by cloud-native technology stacks is beyond human ability to manage. 71% echoed this sentiment globally.

CIOs acknowledged that their teams rely on multiple disparate monitoring and data analytics solutions to maintain observability and security, making it challenging to extract answers quickly and drive digital transformation.

The report also finds that 77% of CIOs worldwide and 80% of Australian CIOs say their IT environment changes once every minute or less.

In addition, Australian CIOs say their teams use an average of 11 monitoring tools throughout their technology stacks, but they only have observability across 9% of their environment.

Further, 59% of CIOs globally and 71% of Australian CIOs say without a more automated approach to IT operations, their teams could soon become overloaded by the increasing complexity of their technology stack.

The report also notes that 64% of CIOs globally and 71% of Australian CIOs say it has become harder to attract and retain enough skilled IT ops and DevOps professionals to manage and maintain their cloud-native stack.

"Multicloud and cloud-native architectures are critical to helping organisations achieve their digital transformation goals," says Bernd Greifeneder, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dynatrace.

"While organisations benefit from the flexibility and scale that these technologies bring, the explosion of observability and security data they produce is increasingly hard to manage and analyse.

"Existing tools, and there can be dozens of them, keep data in silos, making it difficult and expensive to unlock insights when organisations need them. As a result, they struggle to achieve the highest standards for security and performance across their digital services."

Additional findings from the survey include:

• 45% of CIOs globally and 51% of Australian CIOs say it's too costly to manage the large volume of observability and security data using existing analytics solutions, so they only keep what is most critical.
   
• 43% of CIOs globally and 63% of Australian CIOs say current approaches to observability data ingestion and storage won't support their future needs.
   
• 93% of CIOs globally and 91% of Australian CIOs say AIOps and automation are increasingly vital to alleviating the shortage of skilled IT, development, and security professionals and reducing the risk of teams becoming burned out by the complexity of modern cloud and development environments.

"Amidst a sea of data, individual data points are far more valuable when they retain context, which is why teams invest so much effort trying to correlate different streams," Greifeneder adds.

"But today's manual approaches are too reactive and slow, and they miss the most important insights. Teams urgently need a new approach to observability and security data analytics and management.

"AI and automation should underpin this approach, and it should be capable of unifying all data and keeping its relationships and dependencies intact. This will enable organisations to maximise the value of their data and people, reducing the time spent on mundane manual tasks and enabling faster, more secure innovation."