Dave Widener is CTO of MyHealthMath, a provider of health plan decision support tools which simplify every aspect of open enrollment. Widener is executive leader for the company's entire technology function including R&D, strategic planning, cybersecurity, and technical product execution. Widener’s career encompasses IT management and leadership roles in the energy, life sciences, consumer products and banking sectors.
Across the IT community, there is a buzz around the SaaSOps movement, and it has been consistently gaining momentum. As David Politis of BetterCloud describes it: “SaaSOps is a practice referring to how Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are managed and secured through centralized and automated operations (Ops), resulting in reduced friction, improved collaboration, and better employee experience”.
IT Ops and DevOps people live by metrics – but not all metrics are the same. These days, setting and achieving meaningful service level indicators (SLIs), which translate to service level objectives (SLOs) is a desirable target for many IT pros. Meaningful SLOs have a tight connection with real-world user experiences, versus arbitrary metrics that may distract teams from the root cause of an issue.
IT automation is growing in adoption this year as IT organizations grapple with constantly changing priorities, the pressure of supporting large remote workforces and tight resources. However, IT teams are hesitant to deploy automation workflows on production infrastructure that supports important business applications and services. Trust is an issue – but errors do occur. Unsupervised automation can sometimes create more problems by missing the actual context for issue resolution.
Onboard, monitor, and optimize your cloud and cloud-native infrastructure within 30 minutes or less. Are you one of those amazing IT operations professionals who worked hard to migrate enterprise workloads to the public cloud during the pandemic? Your team then probably built hundreds of tags for different types of cloud resources for the right levels of visibility and governance across cost optimization, chargeback, and reporting.
Using data to predict and prevent IT outages and issues is a growing best practice—especially as advances in monitoring software have made it easier to deliver analytics in a timely manner. IT predictive analytics, once known as IT operations analytics (ITOA), is still nascent in many organizations, but it’s far more streamlined than it used to be when one needed to export data sets to specialized analytics tools such as Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI.
As the Northern Hemisphere faces what could be a long, sepulchral winter, there’s no clear vision into the future. Here are some recent stats: Alright then. What is certain is that the private and public sector needs technology leaders who can direct investments strategically and cost-effectively, more than ever.
