The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. – William Ward Arthur
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. FUD.
In the midst of this pandemic, everyone is facing challenges and choices that make no distinction of work-life boundaries. Next, everybody seems to have an opinion and is voicing it omnidirectionally. The only truth is that the underlying infrastructure is not ready to test, identify, and handle the projected increase in the number of sick people.
I’m no pandemic expert. I am going to keep quiet, defer to the real pandemic subject matter experts, and put my trust in them on what to do to mitigate the risk and flatten the curve. Because lives are at stake. Instead, I want to talk about IT practice leadership and focus on delivering well architected solutions during emergency situations to eliminate all the FUD.
All aboard the Practice Leaders’ Ship.
In the midst of a crisis, we look to leaders to find reassurance that everything will be okay. Leaders are made in times of greatest need. They will rise and shine while faux leaders will be recognized as an entitled-by-title leader or worse yet, an IT seagull leader.
We are seeing IT pros show grace under fire and epitomize what leadership is all about. They are keeping the lights on for mission critical healthcare stacks, communications and internet service platforms, collaboration platforms, and virtual app and desktop environments. Communications, connected context, and data are key to battling fear, uncertainty, and doubt. IT pros are stepping in and standing out by connecting people, data, and apps as we all battle this pandemic. They are essential personnel, who are risking their lives in this crisis after all.
Unfortunately, we are also witnessing IT solutions that lacked rigor and discipline in practice leadership since they weren’t well architected to begin with.
Complicated problems require simple stable solutions that scale well.
Failures that have occurred during this crisis have a few common themes such as an organization’s inability to quickly adapt to their workforce going remote, inability to easily scale infrastructure services in its data centers to meet new workload demands, and instability of the platform during this crisis. Even hyper-scalers are not immune to these failures.
Well architected solutions thrive in complex situations, where adaptability means business continuity, where the continuity is essentially the only path to business survivability. A well-architected solution is simple, stable, and scales so that an organization can quickly adapt.
Well architected solutions designed for business continuity
In the midst of this crisis, ransomware attacks are on the rise. Organizations are dealing with these attacks using a workload like Splunk to identify and manage security events as well as automate threat detection and mitigation. For example, Nutanix IT uses Splunk on Nutanix for security ops.
Organizations needed to expand their Splunk environments quickly to deal with the increased number of ransomware attacks as well as monitor and automate IT operations to support the increased number of work from home employees accessing organizational apps and data; but they didn’t have the time to spend months sizing and re-architecting for additional capacity. How did they overcome these challenges with the clock ticking down?
With a well architected solution built on Nutanix, organizations were able to scale their Splunk environment by just adding nodes and blocks in a linear fashion. Moreover, organizations were able to add storage services to manage the increased daily ingest rates and storage capacity requirements with 1-Click simplicity. Best of all, Nutanix Objects is certified to run Splunk SmartStore, which aligns to where Splunk well architected solutions are moving to. Plus, every AOS licensed cluster is entitled to 2TiB worth of Nutanix Objects for free and organizations can aggregate all those entitlements together. For instance, 3 AOS licensed clusters would give an organization 6TiB worth of Nutanix Objects for free to use as an S3-compatible, 1-Click object storage for unstructured data.
In short, to eliminate FUD and navigate crisis situations, IT pros need to take the lead in their practice and build a foundation using well architected solutions. Take a test drive to see what a well architected solution is all about.
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