With fast changing business environment and shortening technology life cycles, change is not only constant but also quite frequent in today’s Enterprises. Because of these evolutions, business applications naturally sprawl and develop interdependencies producing complicated solutions. Ultimately the complexity developed can cause damages, difficult to troubleshoot and will start impacting the business. Glass’ Law (sourced to Roger Sessions of ObjectWatch) states that “for every 25 percent increase in functionality of a system, there is a 100 percent increase in the complexity of that system”.
According to the study conducted by KPMG, employers had to pay an unplanned ~$600,000 for each technology-related problem they faced. These incidents caused by ‘avoidable’ problems such as software coding errors or failed IT changes are accounted for over 50 percent of such incidents. Root cause analysis of those incidents have clearly established strong correlation to poor understanding of application dependencies.
Application sprawl is one of the unintended consequences of DevOps automation, application containerization and IT consumerization. App sprawl can also happen due to other reasons such as mergers and siloed business unit purchases. The proliferation of mobile, cloud and IoT services with the evolution of shadow IT is exasperating the problem even more.
With the growing complexity and size, it is becoming imperative for Enterprises to develop a clear and thorough understanding of their IT and application portfolio, which includes knowing exactly what components are used, where they are deployed (mapping to physical infrastructure and location details), how they are connected to each other(physical and logical), and the business service that rely on them.
So, how does enterprise transform to support rapid changes to their application while avoiding losses due to failed change? And how do enterprises better manage Application sprawl ?
We will discuss specific use cases and solutions that address application sprawl & raid application changes in subsequent posts.
