By Thomas LaRock, Head Geek^™, SolarWinds

For businesses, spring-cleaning has a restorative weight, enabling organisations to place the challenges of the past year behind them and start planning for a bright future ahead. Businesses can also use this opportunity to evaluate their IT environments and define a new path to drive greater business efficiency.

Here are some ideas for IT professionals looking to do a little spring-cleaning this year.

DevOp-timise for the Future

After two years of a global pandemic, we’re now finally starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. But despite COVID-19 restrictions lifting, it’s unlikely we’ll be returning to the life we once knew, particularly when it comes to the way we work.

Some things, such as enhanced collaboration among IT teams, will remain an important focus. This means DevOps can deliver added value and play a key role in driving the business forward.

DevOps and DataOps don’t have to be huge financial burdens for businesses. Instead, they can enable IT professionals to generate value through shared metrics to deliver simple, constructive feedback for every team member to enhance collaboration.

Is Multi-Cloud Right for You?

Multi-cloud strategies are continuing to rise in popularity, with research highlighting over half (64%) of organisations plan on deploying various cloud models over the next three years. This growth is no surprise considering the benefits it promises to provide, including flexibility, reliability, and cost-effective performance optimisation.

However, a separate survey from IDG discovered 79% of enterprises find it difficult to leverage cross-platform synergies, meaning a multi-cloud approach may not be the right solution for every business.

Whether a multi-cloud strategy is right for your business is completely dependent on two crucial factors. First, you need a dedicated and capable DevOps-focused IT team to manage the complexity associated with multi-cloud. If you don’t have this team, you’d better have the budget to outsource the technical aspects and monitoring of the multi-cloud solution.

If your business is confident it can meet the above requirements, then multi-cloud could prove a valuable asset as you rebuild following your spring-cleaning.

Managing Multi-Cloud Through APM

If a multi-cloud approach is the right move for your business, an application performance management (APM) solution is a useful tool to help proactively manage your systems. Deploying an APM solution enables you to monitor application availability, performance, and throughput across the complete cloud application and infrastructure stack. A proper APM tool will also allow you to measure the error rate of transactions in the application.

At a minimum, IT professionals should consider standardising one central APM solution for each cloud environment. But if you’re looking to optimise this approach, you should consider adopting a single APM solution capable of monitoring all apps across multiple cloud platforms on a consistent basis.

This reduces complexity and provides clarity into the status of an organisation’s multi-cloud deployment.

Eliminating Silos

Silos within an IT infrastructure often have a negative impact. It’s vital for every team member to be able to monitor application performance across all components and life cycles. This ability is important for a successful spring-cleaning and will minimise the risk of IT professionals gaining less-than-insightful data.

The dissolution of silos is a natural by-product of businesses prioritising an environment’s overall quality of service over the specific characteristics of technologies, architecture, and operating styles. This comes with many business benefits, which will be particularly felt with regards to any applications with many different components across multiple teams.

Turn to Data in Your Decision-Making Processes

Successful business-wide collaboration only works when everyone sings from the same hymn sheet. If the whole team agrees on metrics and event analytics, businesses can achieve this sense or harmony.

Once this happens, it won’t be a surprise to see significant improvements in access and uptime for critical applications, with performance monitoring being used to gain crucial objective operational data.

Throughout their spring-cleanings, businesses should make sure they have the flexibility to quickly and easily customise and share performance data. This way, teams will be able to communicate more effectively, and the business will benefit as a whole.

The future of technology is full of opportunities for businesses, and a spring-cleaning is the perfect time for IT teams to evaluate their environments and embrace methodologies focused on flexibility and continuous process improvement, including DevOps and APM. Though the last few years have been a challenge for businesses, now is the time to start feeling optimistic about the future.