In response to these cloud challenges, more than one in ten (16%) respondents have already repatriated workloads back to on-premises. Meanwhile, a further 12% acknowledge that poorly planned cloud transitions have already resulted in long-term financial impacts on their organisations. This goes to show that rushed cloud migrations can lead to costly fixes or reversals.

The data also indicates a lack of trust in cloud security, with nearly half (46%) of IT pros still storing their most sensitive data on-premises due to persistent security worries. However, the findings do highlight a continued focus on cloud strategies to reduce costs. Nearly a third (29%) of respondents say they are prioritising cloud migration to cut operational costs.

Commenting on the findings, Sascha Giese, Global Tech Evangelist at SolarWinds, said, “The truth is, managing complex hybrid-cloud ecosystems isn’t easy. While the cloud promises scalability and cost savings, the gap between expectation and execution is becoming increasingly evident. In this landscape, many businesses find themselves grappling with overly complex infrastructures that struggle to meet evolving needs.”

In a hybrid cloud world with increasingly complex networks, systems, devices, and applications, managing microservices and containers adds to the challenge. Without proper planning and comprehensive visibility, organisations risk finding themselves in a dire situation. Tool sprawl, information silos, and alert fatigue can all lead to an unpleasant cloud experience, making it harder to identify the root causes of complex issues.

“To overcome these challenges, IT leaders must adopt a more strategic and informed approach to cloud migration, focusing on tools that are reliable, secure, and accelerate modernisation. One key advantage businesses can leverage to successfully manage their hybrid cloud infrastructures is comprehensive observability. That means gaining real-time visibility into every layer of the IT estate and acting proactively with the assistance of machine learning algorithms and AI-driven analytics. Cloud infrastructure can be a powerful growth enabler, but with a mess of mismatched tools and poor visibility, it will be a bumpy ride,” added Giese.

Check out Arabian Reseller’s GISEC 2024 Special Edition, here: https://arabianreseller.com/april2024

Tell us about the cybersecurity trends for 2024.
Besides the evergreen issues like ransomware attacks, which are still a solid “business model,” we see that our fears regarding AI-based attacks are slowly becoming a reality. Previously, organised cybercrime groups used the unlimited resources of cloud providers as a base for their attacks, but those attacks were rather low-tech. Now with the aid of AI, they are getting smarter. In fact, in the marketplaces of the dark web, we see already trained and ready-to-use AI-based frameworks available for purchase. With the progress in AI voice modelling, we can not only expect new songs in the voice of Elvis but also calls from our CEOs and managers asking for access to resources!

What is the theme of your participation at GISEC 2024?
At GISEC, we will emphasize the critical role of Observability in enhancing the cybersecurity posture of organisations. Simply put, you cannot protect against what you cannot see. In today’s sprawling enterprise IT environments, which can span multiple on-prem data centres and public clouds, the potential for visibility gaps is greater than ever before. Security Observability empowers organisations with visibility across these complex environments, enabling them to reduce the mean time needed to detect, alert, and remediate security incidents.

Which products and solutions will you be showcasing at GISEC 2024?
At GISEC, we intend to showcase SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, our comprehensive, integrated, full-stack observability solution built to integrate data from across the IT ecosystem, including networks, servers, applications, databases, and more. This solution has been developed using the SolarWinds Secure by Design principles and a rigorous adherence to a multi-layer security framework.

We will also use GISEC as an opportunity to demonstrate how the integration of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability with SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) and SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM), enables organizations to better understand complexities in their environments while providing real-time visibility to help detect and remediate security issues. These integrations combine security-related events, metrics, and activities with the other data in Hybrid Cloud Observability and allow customers to monitor their security and compliance status on a dedicated security dashboard.

How are you equipped to help companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?
We have two solid security solutions in our portfolio to help businesses of all sizes deal with access rights and permission management, as well as sorting security-related incidents and properly responding to them. With accesses and permissions, in particular, we see that many organisations still lack proper defences. It’s not rocket science, but all too often something that gets easily overlooked.

Is there a skills gap in the cybersecurity industry? What needs to be done to bridge that gap?
There are obvious gaps when it comes to new-ish technologies. AI is the most popular one, but there are more fields open to attacks. For example, we cannot expect a security analyst to be a Kubernetes expert at the same time. Instead of upskilling, which is a wide stretch in this example, we should take a step back and remind ourselves that everyone is part of the extended security team. Security is a team challenge, and we’re all sitting in the same boat.

At the event, SolarWinds will showcase enhancements to SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, a comprehensive, integrated, full-stack observability solution built to integrate data from across the IT ecosystem, including networks, servers, applications, databases, and more. Hybrid Cloud Observability was developed using the SolarWinds Secure by Design principles and a rigorous adherence to a multi-layer security framework.

Hybrid Cloud Observability includes integrations with SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) and SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM), enabling organizations to better understand complexities in their environments while providing real-time visibility to help detect and remediate security issues. This integration combines security-related events, metrics, and activities with the other data in Hybrid Cloud Observability and allows the customer to monitor their security and compliance status on a dedicated security dashboard.

“We help customers to drive meaningful digital transformations within today’s hybrid and multi-cloud environments to achieve their overall business goals,” said Abdul Rehman Tariq, regional sales director for the Middle East at SolarWinds. “At GISEC 2024, we’ll present alongside our key partners, CyberKnight and Spire Solutions, on how SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability can reduce IT complexity and provide the single-pane-of-glass visibility organizations of all sizes and industries need to build a cyber resilience strategy.”

“As AI becomes more sophisticated and its application more widespread—from consumer uses like ChatGPT to impactful enterprise implementations like automated service delivery and anomaly detection—it’s no longer the presence of AI that’s notable, but the application of it,” said Jeff Stewart, vice president of global solutions engineering at SolarWinds. “Thanks in large part to impressive strides in the advancement of AI and machine learning this year, enterprises are better equipped than ever to solve, or even avoid, costly hits to their systems, services, or bottom line in 2024.”

For 2024, SolarWinds forecasts these themes—powered and accelerated by AI and machine learning—will shape the enterprise technology landscape:

• Observability across the full tech stack will become a priority. According to SolarWinds research, the typical enterprise loses more than $13M annually to costs associated with the nine brownouts or outages experienced each month. Despite this, nearly half of IT professionals surveyed lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure. AI-powered observability solutions address this by collecting data to provide information on what’s not performing as expected and why—allowing teams to take a proactive approach to eliminating downtime, innovating, and exceeding customer expectations.
• Organizations will prioritize getting to the root of database issues. One-third of IT professionals surveyed manage upwards of 300 databases. This year, teams will embrace AI and automation to ensure the health, stability, and scalability of their services. In addition to the ability to identify issues at their root cause, IT teams will benefit from real-time issue remediation, understanding database implications as new code is deployed, and even avoiding costly outages.
• Organizations will embrace Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) to support busy teams. With AIOps, organizations can integrate data from across complex hybrid IT environments and receive the actionable, predictive intelligence they need to optimize performance, resolve issues quickly, and relieve pressure on IT teams. Furthermore, AIOps are paving the way toward autonomous operations, which will require little to no human intervention.
• IT Service Management (ITSM) will support faster, more successful IT outcomes. On average, research shows that organizations surveyed who adopted AI-powered tools to meet their ITSM needs were able to reduce system downtime by 21% and decrease time spent resolving incident and service requests by 23%. Features such as virtual troubleshooting agents and guided incident resolution will continue to support the workload of IT teams in 2024. SolarWinds Service Desk customers surveyed reported saving 23 hours per week due to reduced ticket volume—nearly the equivalent of adding an extra employee to their team.

Throughout 2023, SolarWinds retained its position as an industry leader by continually developing modern IT and software solutions that evolve in lockstep with the challenges faced by today’s enterprises as they attempt to compete, scale, and innovate. SolarWinds solutions are rooted in the company’s deep connection with tech professionals. The company engaged directly with customers through THWACK, its community of over 180,000 users, to develop and test the new AI capabilities and ensure they make it easier for IT pros to do their jobs.

Tell us about the SolarWinds database observability platform.
Nearly everything a modern business does from a digital perspective requires data. Thus, databases are among the enterprise’s most valuable IT assets. This makes it critical for organisations to ensure their databases are optimised for performance and cost.

That said, databases represent the most difficult ecosystems to observe, tune, manage, and scale. Not only are there different types of databases that serve different purposes, but they are also populated by different types of data, adding to their complexity. The implications of not having visibility into your databases can be anywhere from a costly annoyance to a significant issue that causes business service disruption. For example, most application performance issues, between 70% and 88%, are rooted in the database.

For this reason, databases have largely been seen as a black box for most organisations. You know what goes into it. And you know what comes out and how long that took. However, the complexities that occur within the black box of the database are harder to discern.

This is where the SolarWinds Database Observability comes in. This offering is built for the needs of the modern enterprise environment and helps ensure optimal performance by providing full, unified visibility and query-level workload monitoring across centralised, distributed, cloud-based, and on-premises databases. Organisations armed with SolarWinds Database Observability enhance their ability to understand database implications as new code is deployed, utilise real-time troubleshooting of database performance issues, and isolate unusual behaviour and potential issues within the database.

How does database observability help IT teams track and manage infrastructure, applications, and possible threats?
Database observability collects data about the performance, stability, and overall health of an organisation’s monitored databases to address and prevent issues, and provides deep database performance monitoring to drive speed, efficiency, and savings. With SolarWinds Observability — which supports MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server database instances — database performance, responsiveness, and error rate are conveniently displayed in dashboards.

Moreover, alerts can be configured to notify admins by email or other methods when user-defined thresholds are crossed. This allows them to identify and remedy issues before they can develop. By gaining insight into the activities taking place inside their database instances, teams can understand user experience as well as ensure systems can scale to meet demand.

What sort of enhancements has your observability platform received recently?
Just this November, we announced major enhancements in the Database Observability capability within our cloud-based SolarWinds Observability platform. SolarWinds Database Observability provides full visibility into open-source, cloud-enabled, and NoSQL databases to identify and address costly and critical threats to their systems and business. It is now possible to navigate across all of the samples collected globally, giving IT teams an empirical distribution of random samples, which resembles the main workload.

What factors according to you will drive the adoption of observability tools in the MEA region?
The Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) are riding a wave of rampant digital transformation as organisations seek to remain competitive. According to IDC, digital transformation spending in the Middle East will accelerate at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% over the five-year period, topping US$74 billion in 2026 and accounting for 43.2% of all ICT investments made that year. As organisations continue to shift workloads to multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, the complexity of their IT environments still continues to increase. This raises the potential for visibility and monitoring gaps which ultimately translate to underwhelming or outright frustrating experiences for end users.

Tell us about the top three trends you foresee for 2024.
There are clear signs of the continued adoption of cloud technologies to allow enterprises to become more agile, giving engineering teams the ability to focus on their core competencies and expand and contract on demand.

The adoption of Kubernetes is also increasing as the refocusing introduced by the cloud enables the move to microservices-based architectures which require sophisticated orchestration management.

Finally, we are starting to see an uptick in Vector databases, as applications demand better handling of relationships between data points.

What is going to be your top priority in terms of strategies for 2024?
We will continue to deliver on our vision of making observability easy. OpenTelemetry is driving observability, but data collection is nothing if it can’t provide insights. So, we aim to ensure the data is both collected and curated such that users find it easy to consume and extract valuable insight.

Regionally, through 2024, we will continue to focus on our key markets of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the ongoing enhancement of our product portfolio, and the strengthening of our channel ecosystem to create more markets for our business and for our partners.

Database Observability is part of the SolarWinds Database Performance Management portfolio, which includes SQL Sentry and Database Performance Analyzer. With the new capabilities, SolarWinds now offers one of the most comprehensive Database Performance Management portfolios in the industry.

According to the company, database performance is critical to the success of an organization’s IT strategy and business operations. However, databases also lead to some of the most complex challenges that IT teams face due to the complicated, business-critical, and difficult-to-diagnose issues they often present. Without complete and precise database monitoring and observability, IT and DevOps teams struggle to accurately diagnose the root cause of performance issues—risking costly downtime, decreased quality of service delivery, and other critical threats to the health and growth potential of the entire enterprise.

“The SolarWinds Database Observability offering is built for the needs of the modern enterprise environment and helps ensure optimal performance by providing full, unified visibility and query-level workload monitoring across centralised, distributed, cloud-based, and on-premises databases. Organizations armed with SolarWinds Database Observability enhance their ability to understand database implications as new code is deployed, utilize real-time troubleshooting of database performance issues, and isolate unusual behaviour and potential issues within the database,” the company claimed.

“Databases are often seen as the opaque and unknowable black box of IT, but organizations no longer need to settle for that lack of visibility. Today’s enterprises require full insight into their system performance across the full tech stack in order to stay ahead of issues, prevent outages, and understand the health and scalability of their systems and services,” said Cullen Childress, Senior Vice President at SolarWinds. “SolarWinds Database Observability was built to reimagine and redefine the performance and capabilities of the database environment as it becomes increasingly complicated.”

“Built for the cloud and designed to simplify database performance management, SolarWinds Database Observability empowers enterprises to identify critical issues, even those caused by complex dependencies between the database, operating system, and network. SolarWinds Database Observability is the latest powerful capability available through SolarWinds Observability, a fully integrated, cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that provides unified and comprehensive visibility across the entire technology stack to meet service-level objectives and optimize user experiences,” the company said.

Download the Arabian Reseller GITEX 2023 Special Edition: https://arabianreseller.com/oct2023

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“Technology is pervasive and can be complex, with an ever-expanding ecosystem of applications and infrastructure. For more than 20 years, we’ve been committed to understanding the people and organizations we serve, as well as their challenges, to diligently deliver the IT operations management solutions they need,” said Laurent Delattre, vice president EMEA sales, SolarWinds. “We believe this partnership with CyberKnight will increase our market penetration in the Middle East by bringing best-in-breed IT operations management and observability solutions to regional enterprise and government customers.”

“A holistic approach is essential to simplify IT operations management complexities, address business priorities, and remain competitive in today’s constantly shifting environment. In addition, organizations need comprehensive visibility and control over their IT systems through continuous monitoring of on-premises and cloud environments to help prevent security vulnerabilities and performance issues. As a new SolarWinds distributor, our goal is to help regional organizations solve their IT management challenges while ensuring their IT operations run smoothly,” commented Avinash Advani, Founder, and CEO at CyberKnight.