Emanuele Cagnola, Regional Vice President Italy of Dynatrace, tells us about the evolution of the concept of security and the transformation of businesses.
– In an increasingly changing technological scenario, some companies are struggling to keep up and achieve a true “digital transformation”. How does Dynatrace support customers and potential customers in completing this evolution?
Behind the topic of digital transformation we find a myriad of intertwined challenges, and, as is known, some of these are not of a technological nature. Resistance to change, affection towards usual approaches and tools, and the presence of departmental silos are some of the brakes on innovation that we often have to deal with. For us, it is crucial to show potential customers how to tame the complexity and dynamism of modern cloud-native architectures through a more effective and intelligent approach, capable of facilitating collaboration and addressing those problems that drain their resources.
Our strength is the ability to support the many initiatives of team Dev, IT Ops, Security and business by providing precise, data-driven answers through an all-in-one platform. All this leaving room for partner customizations and integrations and ensuring maximum flexibility also from a licensing point of view. Among our clients in Italy and around the world we find public and private organizations, traditional and digital-native, operating in all business sectors, who have chosen the Dynatrace platform to accelerate their transformation journey.
– How is the role of IT and CIOs evolving, in light of the ongoing technological renewal underway?
Since the pandemic, the role of IT has changed profoundly: from a support function, often seen as an inevitable cost item, it has become an essential element of the business. Indeed, in many cases it has become the business itself. In such a context, the role of the CIO has also undergone an evolution. The IT leaders we deal with on a daily basis highlight that expectations towards them have grown: in addition to being seen as bearers of technological innovation, they are considered the nerve center of cross-departmental collaboration. I think for example of CIO Of Airports Of Roma and the increasingly strategic role of the IT department in mission-critical airport processes.
In the meantime, user satisfaction has become one of the most important indicators for evaluating the success of IT initiatives: this is why observability of the application ecosystem and analysis of the performance of digital services have become essential and represent two important points for the attention of CIOs.
Business automation and transformation
– In the absence of a Chief AI Officer or ad hoc committee, CIOs must also lead the introduction of AI into business processes. As?
Since 2022, the year ChatGPT was launched, public and private organizations have been infected by AI fever, and have launched numerous initiatives aimed at understanding how to exploit this technology. At a recent event of ours focused on this topic, the CxOs present confirmed their attention to some specific use cases in which AI can effectively support – not replace – their teams. Speaking of causal and predictive AI, we find the distribution of better and safer software, the ability to respond more quickly to incidents, the evolution towards a proactive approach and, last but not least, the adoption of FinOps practices.
Generative AI instead finds its maximum expression in the access and analysis of data, the production of which has now exceeded the human ability to manage it, even by non-technical users. These are use cases well known to our customers: Davis A.I.the hypermodal artificial intelligence at the core of the Dynatrace platform, has been helping them overcome the challenge of complexity and innovate more quickly for the past 10 years.
– User requests are increasingly specific and targeted, how can we guarantee high performance of digital services?
We users no longer make a distinction between traditional and digital businesses, and we expect our bank, energy supplier or municipality of residence to provide digital services with quality comparable to those offered by big tech companies. The problem is that behind each service there is a constellation of components that are distributed and interconnected, which change dynamically and which are implemented and managed by different teams with fragmented skills and non-integrated tools. In this context it is necessary to ensure end-to-end observability of the entire application stack and provide a single shared source of truth to all actors involved, so as to reduce blind spots and promote business collaboration.
Accidents can still happen, and in these cases it is essential to obtain timely answers on the exact cause that generated the problem, without having to look for the needle in the haystack or activate “war rooms”. It is also essential to measure the quality of the user experience using reliable indicators and to be able to analyze individual sessions to understand how to optimize the customer journey. These are scenarios successfully addressed and shared by some genuinely user-centric Dynatrace customers such as ConTe.it, Alpitour and Gruppo San Donato.
– Poor investments and lack of skills represent two problems that have been present in our country for many years. How do you resolve a situation like this? What do you do to enhance channel skills and facilitate business transformation?
When resources are scarce, the priority is not to waste those available. Recent global surveys highlight that IT teams spend 40% of their time “making things work”. Security teams waste about 28% of their energy analyzing false positives and managing tasks that could be automated. Dynatrace provides CIOs and CISOs with a unified observability and application security platform that helps them free up valuable time for innovation and eliminate the risk of burnout. Increasing retention and efficiency is a good starting point to make up for the chronic lack of skills and resources.
Of course, we understand that adopting new technology can present pitfalls. In addition to having a team of experts who offer support in Italian, we make use of a network of specialized partners that include the most important global system integrators and numerous local companies capable of covering that last mile between us and the customer. Furthermore, we offer customers and partners online and in-person training tools, as well as certification paths to increase their skills.
– FinOps: without observability and intelligent automation it is not possible to optimize resources without impacting the efficiency of services. How to do?
The balance between committed resources – and related costs – and service provision is precarious because it depends on constantly changing conditions. I am not referring exclusively to the classic example of Black Friday, but also to much more frequent events. In fact, every release or minimal reconfiguration of the environment can upset everything and cause impacts on the user experience. The observability of the entire ecosystem and the measurement of real user experiences provide the parameters and context that Davis AI can use to capture the as-is and offer predictions about future needs.
Artificial intelligence and business transformation
This information can be used to manually optimize your environment or automate workflows aimed at dynamically correcting sizing based on expected service levels. This allows us to avoid the typical oversizing caused by total or partial “blindness” on the real performance of applications and services, by an excess of caution on the part of designers or by a lift&shift migration that requires careful fine-tuning work. Already in 2021 we presented an emblematic success case focused on the optimization of the AWS cloud environment of Enel, one of the main energy operators in Italy.
– The entire production sector and every industrial sector is now more sensitive to ESG issues. What is your point of view? What are your initiatives?
Among the new responsibilities assigned to CIOs we find the efficiency of the so-called “carbon footprint” of IT environments, which falls under the broad umbrella of ESG issues. Again, end-to-end observability is an enabler. In 2023, we released the Dynatrace Carbon Impact app to all our SaaS customers, which translates usage metrics – including CPU, memory, disk and network I/O – into their CO2 equivalents (CO2e), and provides actionable insights on how to reduce IT’s overall carbon footprint. Earlier this year we announced we were working with Lloyds Banking Group, one of the UK’s largest financial services providers, to further develop the app and contribute to the organisation’s sustainability goals.