1) Org Silos & Slow Flow From Idea → Prod

Symptoms: “Throw-over-the-wall” handoffs, long lead time, many approvals, unclear ownership, ops drowning in tickets.
Root causes: Functional silos, unclear boundaries, local optimizations (team KPIs) that fight global flow, change-aversion culture.

What to do

• Team Topology: Product-aligned, cross-functional “you build it, you run it” teams. Create a platform team that offers paved roads (golden paths).
• Flow Practices: Trunk-based development, small batch sizes, WIP limits, value stream mapping (find big queues & cut wait time).
• Policy-by-Default: Default-approve low-risk changes (risk-based change mgmt) when automated checks pass.
• Governance via Metrics: Run the org on DORA metrics: Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Change Failure Rate, MTTR.

Tech enablers: Backstage (IDP), feature flags, branch protection, CODEOWNERS, reusable pipeline templates, golden repos/templates.

KPIs:

• Lead time (PR opened → prod) < 1 day for majority of changes
• Deployment frequency daily or more per service
• CFR < 15%; MTTR < 1 hour for sev2

Anti-patterns: CABs that approve everything manually; ticket-driven ops for every deploy; environment “ownership ping-pong”.

2) CI/CD at Scale: Flaky, Slow, Unreliable Pipelines

Symptoms: 40–90 min pipelines, frequent flaky tests, long-lived branches, release day drama.
Root causes: Bloated stages, non-hermetic builds, shared mutable environments, lack of test strategy.

What to do

• Pipeline Architecture
  • Make builds hermetic & cacheable (deterministic deps, lockfiles, remote build cache).
  • Split into fast fail stages (lint/typecheck/unit) before slow ones (integration, e2e).
  • Parallelize & shard tests; quarantine flaky tests with automatic deflake jobs.
• Test Strategy (Pyramid + Contracts)
  • Pyramid: unit (many), integration (some), e2e (few).
  • Add consumer-driven contract tests for microservices; shift many e2e checks into contracts.
• Ephemeral Environments
  • Spin preview environments per PR (K8s namespace/Helm or Terraform workspace) seeded with minimal test data.
• Quality Gates
  • Static analysis (style, lint, security), coverage deltas, performance budgets, SBOM and image scans as PR gates.
• Release Strategies
  • Progressive delivery: canary, blue/green, auto-rollback on SLO/SLA signals.

Tech enablers: GitHub Actions/GitLab CI/Tekton; Artifactory/ECR/GCR; Argo Rollouts/Flagger; Pact for contracts; SonarQube; Testcontainers.

KPIs:

• Median pipeline time < 10–15 min for PR checks
• Flaky test rate < 1%; time-to-fix flaky < 48h
• >95% PRs get a preview environment

Anti-patterns: Everything is an end-to-end test; shared QA env bottleneck; manual smoke tests on prod.

3) Software Supply Chain & Cloud Security (DevSecOps)

Symptoms: Secrets in repos, surprise CVEs, unknown provenance of images, drift in policies across clusters.
Root causes: Late security gates, unpinned deps, opaque build steps, manual exceptions.

What to do

• Shift-Left Security
  • SAST & SCA on PRs; container & IaC scans (Terraform/K8s) before merge.
  • Pin dependencies, enforce renovation (Renovate/Dependabot) with risk-tiered auto-merge.
• Provenance & Integrity
  • Build SBOM (CycloneDX/Syft) per artifact; sign images & attestations (cosign/sigstore, in-toto).
  • Aim for SLSA Level 3 practices: isolated builders, tamper-evident provenance, policy on verified signatures at deploy.
• Policy-as-Code
  • Admission control with OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno for baseline: disallow :latest, require non-root, resource limits, required labels, only-signed images.
• Secrets & Identity
  • Centralized secrets mgmt (Vault/Secrets Manager), short-lived creds, IRSA/Workload Identity, no long-lived keys in CI.
• Runtime Guardrails
  • Pod Security Standards, minimal base images, read-only FS, network policies, egress control.

KPIs:

• % images signed & verified in prod = 100%
• Mean time to remediate critical vulns < 7 days
• Policy violations per deploy trend ↓ month over month

Anti-patterns: Security as a final gate; blanket whitelists; unscanned base images; secrets sprinkled in env vars & git.

4) Environment Drift & Configuration Chaos (Infra & App Config)

Symptoms: “Works in staging, fails in prod”, hand-edited clusters, mystery configs, emergency shell fixes.
Root causes: Manual changes, unversioned infra, mixed responsibilities, mutable long-lived envs.

What to do

• Everything-as-Code
  • Infra via Terraform/Pulumi; K8s via Helm/Kustomize; no manual kubectl apply to prod.
• GitOps for Deploy
  • Argo CD/Flux watches a single source of truth; changes are pull-requested, reviewed, and auto-applied.
  • Promotion via tags/branches (dev → uat → prod) with the same manifests and only value overrides.
• Modules & Reusability
  • Terraform and Helm modules with versioning; a registry of “golden” modules (VPC, EKS, DB, Kafka topics).
• Drift Detection
  • terraform plan in CI; Argo diff policies; alerts on out-of-band changes; periodic reconciliation reports.
• Config Hygiene
  • Strict resource requests/limits; config schema checks; feature flags for behavior, not environment forks.

Tech enablers: Terraform Cloud/Atlantis; Argo CD/Flux; Helmfile; ConfTest/OPA; Feature flag platforms.

KPIs:

• % infra/app changes via PR = 100%
• Config drift incidents → 0
• Mean time from merge to deploy minutes, not hours

Anti-patterns: Long-lived snowflake environments; divergent Helm charts per env; “quick fix on prod” shell sessions.

5) Observability, Reliability & Cost (SRE + FinOps)

Symptoms: Alert fatigue, slow incident detection, unknown blast radius, runaway cloud bills.
Root causes: Tool sprawl, metric overload, logs without sampling, no SLOs, ambiguous ownership, no cost guardrails.

What to do

• Observability First
  • Standardize on OpenTelemetry for traces/metrics/logs; propagate trace IDs end-to-end.
  • SLOs + Error Budgets per service (user-centric). Alert on symptoms, not causes (e.g., elevated 5xx & latency).
• Incident Ops
  • Runbooks & auto-remediation (known failure signatures → actions), practiced on-call, postmortems with actionable follow-ups.
  • Progressive delivery hooks to auto-roll back on SLO breaches.
• FinOps
  • Cost allocation tags everywhere; dashboards of $/txn, $/service.
  • K8s rightsizing (requests/limits), autoscaling (HPA/VPA/Karpenter), spot where safe, storage lifecycle policies, log sampling & tiering.
• Capacity & Resilience
  • Chaos experiments on critical paths (retry/backoff/timeouts), circuit breakers, bulkheads, multi-AZ as default.

Tech enablers: OTel, Prometheus/Tempo/Loki or vendor suite; incident tooling (pager/runbook); Karpenter; cost tools (native & 3rd-party).

KPIs:

• MTTR < 30–60 min; alert acknowledgement < 5 min
• Alert noise: actionable alerts > 80%
• Cost per request stable/↓ while traffic ↑ (efficiency trend)

Anti-patterns: Alerting on every low-level metric; 90-day log hoarding; infinite cardinality labels; no trace sampling.

A Reference Delivery Flow (Put It Together)

1. Developer opens PR → fast PR checks (lint, unit, SAST/SCA, IaC scan)
2. Build hermetic artifact → produce SBOM → sign image + provenance
3. Spin preview environment → run integration/contract tests
4. On merge, publish version & update GitOps repo (env overlays)
5. Argo CD syncs → progressive delivery (canary) gated by SLOs/health
6. OTel traces + metrics feed autoscaling & rollback logic
7. Post-deploy verification + auto-change record
8. Cost & reliability scorecards roll up weekly

30 / 60 / 90 Day Rollout

First 30 days (Foundations)

• Pick 1–3 “lighthouse” services.
• Introduce trunk-based dev on those repos; enable PR checks and preview envs.
• Baseline DORA metrics; create SLOs for at least 1 user journey.
• Start SBOM + image signing; gate deploys on signatures in non-prod.
• Terraform plan in CI; Argo CD for one environment.

Days 31–60 (Scale the Paved Road)

• Expand GitOps to all envs of lighthouse services; DRY Helm/TF modules.
• Add contract tests; quarantine & deflake.
• Enforce policy-as-code (Kyverno/Gatekeeper) cluster-wide.
• Incident runbooks, paging, and error budgets enforced; begin progressive delivery.

Days 61–90 (Org & Economics)

• Roll paved road org-wide; codify golden repo templates.
• FinOps tagging, request/limit hygiene; introduce Karpenter/VPA where fit.
• Sign & verify all prod images; SLSA-3 style provenance for critical pipelines.
• Quarterly VSM (value stream map) review; tie OKRs to DORA & SLOs.

Quick Wins (This Week)

• Turn on branch protection + required PR checks for one critical service.
• Add SBOM generation + image signing to that pipeline.
• Enable preview environments for PRs.
• Create 1 SLO (latency & 5xx) and alert only on budget burn.
• Add OPA/Kyverno policies: block :latest, enforce non-root, require limits.

Tooling Examples (pick equivalents you already use)

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions / GitLab / Tekton
• GitOps: Argo CD / Flux
• Progressive delivery: Argo Rollouts / Flagger
• Security: SonarQube, Trivy/Grype, cosign/sigstore, OPA/Kyverno, Renovate/Dependabot
• Testing: Jest/JUnit + Pact + Testcontainers
• Obs: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Tempo/Jaeger, Loki, Datadog/New Relic
• Infra: Terraform, Helm/Kustomize, Karpenter, External Secrets/Vault
• Platform/DevEx: Backstage, golden templates

Self-Assessment Checklist

• DORA metrics visible per service; lead time < 1 day for most changes
• Every deploy is GitOps-driven; no manual edits in prod
• SBOM + signed images; deploys verify signatures
• SLOs exist for top user journeys; alerts map to them
• Preview envs for PRs; pipeline median < 15 min
• Policy-as-code enforces baseline security in clusters
• Cost per txn monitored; autoscaling and rightsizing in place

Cloud adoption is now a key framework for the technology that upholds our everyday life, and has evolved into an essential feature for all businesses.

Within the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw a clear focus on crisis management – with organisations desperate to build on their cloud usage and adopt new tech to ensure business continuity. Now, cloud technology is vital to a company’s digital transformation. With the situation in our world continuing for the foreseeable future, businesses are being pushed to guarantee their digital transformation to not only be dependable but competitive.

As a huge part of society responded to the pandemic and made the decision to enter into some sort of lockdown, companies and businesses of every kind were affected. We witnessed a mass employment shift from being centralised in offices to working remotely from home, and the cloud sphere became depended upon in ways we have never seen before. Not only did businesses have to ensure access to files to be able to continue to work from a new work environment, they also had to ensure their cloud-based services were entirely stable and secure. Since then, the world has moved on to the next phase, which involves a focus on leveraging the right tech, increasing business advocacy and gathering insights to move towards a more all-pervasive model of business.

Whether you’re 90% through completion or just getting started on your digital transformation journey, businesses must approach their change in three key areas.

The first should be at the heart of all businesses’ efforts; transforming the customer experience. People, and more specifically customers, are the reason you exist and continue to flourish. Their comfort, happiness and ability to access a great end product – whether it’s migrating small workloads to cloud or a complete rehaul towards enterprise-wide virtual desktop infrastructure. People need to be central to your business model and first on your list when considering a digital transformation.

A successful example of this was our work with a large telecommunications network provider in the USA. The company wanted to store and access their documents and digital assets in a structured manner, with access from anywhere in order to drive omni-channel content management and accelerate experience delivery. To help them achieve these objectives, we proposed a Digital Contract Automation & Storage (DCAS) solution – a cloud-based integrated solution for e-signature and digital storage that provides enhanced associate and agent experience at various corporate and retail stores. These solutions provided secure storage, collaboration, upload and management of all documents digitally – which lead to a much-enhanced customer experience.

The second area to focus on is systems and processes. Nearly all business models need updating to adapt with an everchanging world. This is particularly true in 2020 and will be for the years to come, as we can be sure that this pandemic will change the workings of the world forever. We can see just how important this step is, with the example of a US-based steel distribution company. They had legacy systems that resulted in a significant amount of manual operations and lack of end-to-end visibility of data – which hindered their growth and speed-to-market. Wipro helped the organization remove bottlenecks in key business processes and recommended a robust solution for current and future needs. This led to an updated and streamlined processes, which improved financial analytics and profitability analysis.

Finally, digital transformations don’t exist without technology. The introduction of new devices, machines, servers and cloud services, as well as updating the old, existing units and model, is essential to keep business fresh and competitive. This has been shown with our work with a global packaged food company which creates plant-based products through over 100 different brands. This UK-based food company embarked on an all-new IT infrastructure and applications landscape in place of the legacy inherited from the parent company. Wipro worked with the client to implement the entire infrastructure (excluding network), supply chain applications and processes. This focus on upgrading and refreshing the system allowed the company to have access to a future-proof platform with world-class processes and technology to support the business.

Within that entire overview of how to focus your digital transformation efforts, cloud adoption is undoubtably a crucial, underlying part that will transform business for the better – or worse if not executed, implemented or upheld correctly. Either way it is now more important than ever to any businesses’ future.

Organizations are rapidly implementing sophisticated technologies as they are shifting to the digital. This typically begins with building a transformative vision pertaining to how an organization will look like in the digital world. Transitioning to a digital ecosystem requires considerable undertakings and a skilled digital transformation team that will define an organization’s digital structure and processes to facilitate the germane changes within the company.

Here is the list of top 10 IT roles that will define a successful digital transformation.

Data Architect
A data architect plays a key role in today’s big data world. It is the architect behind data architecture, creating blueprints for data management systems. Data architects design a plan to integrate, centralize, protect and maintain data. As industries are increasingly going through a massive digital transformation, the role of data architects has become crucial. They allow businesses to access critical information in the right place, at the right time.

Cloud Specialists
Cloud specialists are responsible for maintaining the cloud-related issues within an organization. They implement and maintain server and network infrastructures. As a cloud specialist deals with a company’s information and services to be migrated to the cloud, their role is critical for continued operation in a digital landscape. Migrating a business application to cloud infrastructures are a significant step towards digital transformation, cloud specialists help companies to make faster and successful cloud migration.

Digital Product Managers
The success of a product team lies in the ability of a digital product manager. They oversee the entire life cycle of a product. A digital product manager is also responsible for storytelling, crafting product narratives, while owning the entire product from top to bottom to ensure effective user experience (UX).

Financial Analyst
Financial analysts make business recommendations for an organization based on analyses they carry out on factors like market trends. They articulate the financial value of digital transformation strategies, create a business case and present an accountability matrix. They are primarily responsible for creating financial models that can envisage the outcome of business decisions. Financial analysts work with all members and other finance professionals to ensure that the team looks at transformation activities from a financial standpoint.

Solution Architect
A solutions architect is an expert and one of the most imperative and client-facing roles in the IT industry. They are the technology leaders that design the IT architecture of a software system. As digital transformation demands specific expertise and a set of practices to align business focus with technology solutions, solution architects perform a crucial role in explaining how the adoption of these practices can help solve business problems.

Data Analysts
Data analysts hold a vital role in the digital transformation journey as they retrieve, gather and assess data. They enable organizations to take a data-driven approach to the decision-making process. Data analysts explore the way how data can be used to answer questions and solve problems businesses face while making the digital leap. With the development of computers and an ever-increasing move toward technological intertwinement, data analysis has evolved greatly.

Chief Digital Officer
A chief digital officer (CDO) focuses on creating new business opportunities, revenue streams and customer services by using digital technologies. The role of a CDO can be found operating under different titles such as digital strategist, digital marketing officer, and digital general manager. CDOs are typically responsible for helping the enterprise to develop and execute a cohesive digital strategy.

UX Designers
As the user experience is vital for a company’s product success, a UX designer plays a crucial role in the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product. UX designers work as part of a wider product team and help bridge the gap between the user, the development team, and key business stakeholders. They generally advocate for the end-user. They should understand the customer journey and develop an optimized experience. They also make sure that IT solutions have a user-centric design.

Database Administrator
Database administrators specialize in storing and organizing data. They comprise everything required to manage a database and make it available as needed. They install and upgrade the database server and application tools. As a database administrator requires knowledge of database queries, database theory, database design and more, they ensure compliance with database vendor license agreement, including a number of installations, while taking care of licensing renewals.

Systems Integrators
The role of a systems integrator is to link component subsystems and ensure they work together as a unit. Systems integrators design, develop, synthesize and implement technological applications that are customized to meet an organization’s needs. Their role can be found in diverse fields, but generally used in information technology such as computer networking, the defense industry, the mass media, enterprise application integration, business process management, or manual computer programming.

Google Cloud announced a multi-year agreement with Tapestry, the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman, to migrate its SAP S/4HANA environment to the cloud, modernizing its IT infrastructure and increasing overall operational efficiency. This partnership is a critical step to Tapestry’s broader acceleration program and furthers the company’s goal to drive growth and enhance profitability across its portfolio.

While Tapestry’s three brands operate and maintain a unique brand identity and culture, the company serves as an enabling platform that enhances opportunities for each of the three brands, working to gain benefits and efficiencies across each where appropriate. With support from Google Cloud Partner Lumen, Google Cloud and Tapestry collaborated to migrate Tapestry’s SAP software environment onto Google Cloud. Accomplishing this during a global pandemic meant adapting to rapidly shifting work environments, but the team completed the task in just three-and-a-half months, ensuring the organization was up-and-running ahead of the holiday shopping season.

“Google Cloud has been a great partner, providing the power and elasticity for SAP S/4 HANA that our organization needed in order to achieve our goals of leveraging data and leading with a digital-first mindset,” said Ashish Parmar, Chief Information Officer at Tapestry. “Google Cloud has been an accelerator for our new digital capabilities, and our migration – even during the restrictions of a global pandemic – highlighted the successful collaboration and teamwork amongst the organizations.”

With its SAP S/4HANA suite now on Google Cloud, Tapestry is able to increase operational efficiency, allow for flexibility within the platform, and enable future innovation. As Tapestry continues to accelerate its digital transformation, it has access to Google Cloud’s full spectrum of solutions, including Google Cloud’s Network Intelligence Center. Working to ensure uptime and consistent performance of systems is key for any retailer, especially during peak shopping events when the spikes in demand can be extraordinary. With Network Intelligence Center, Tapestry can now quickly resolve any connectivity issues, cut down troubleshooting time, and ultimately improve the online shopper experience.

As we conclude one of the most turbulent years in retail history, retail leaders across the industry are prioritizing and heavily investing in their IT systems to accelerate their digital transformations, unlocking growth and performance improvement opportunities, while quickly bringing new experiences to life,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail & Consumer at Google Cloud. “By partnering with Google Cloud and Lumen, Tapestry now has the foundation to quickly understand the performance across each of its global brands through real-time insights—and take action to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. We’re excited to partner with iconic brands like those at Tapestry and help further their digital transformational journeys.”

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Google Cloud today announced a multi-year agreement with Tapestry, the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman, to migrate its SAP S/4HANA® environment to the cloud, modernizing its IT infrastructure and increasing overall operational efficiency. This partnership is a critical step to Tapestry’s broader acceleration program and furthers the company’s goal to drive growth and enhance profitability across its portfolio.

While Tapestry’s three brands operate and maintain a unique brand identity and culture, the company serves as an enabling platform that enhances opportunities for each of the three brands, working to gain benefits and efficiencies across each where appropriate. With support from Google Cloud Partner Lumen, Google Cloud and Tapestry collaborated to migrate Tapestry’s SAP® software environment onto Google Cloud. Accomplishing this during a global pandemic meant adapting to rapidly shifting work environments, but the team completed the task in just three-and-a-half months, ensuring the organization was up-and-running ahead of the holiday shopping season.

“Google Cloud has been a great partner, providing the power and elasticity for SAP S/4 HANA that our organization needed in order to achieve our goals of leveraging data and leading with a digital-first mindset,” said Ashish Parmar, Chief Information Officer at Tapestry. “Google Cloud has been an accelerator for our new digital capabilities, and our migration – even during the restrictions of a global pandemic – highlighted the successful collaboration and teamwork amongst the organizations.”

With its SAP S/4HANA suite now on Google Cloud, Tapestry is able to increase operational efficiency, allow for flexibility within the platform, and enable future innovation. As Tapestry continues to accelerate its digital transformation, it has access to Google Cloud’s full spectrum of solutions, including Google Cloud’s Network Intelligence Center. Working to ensure uptime and consistent performance of systems is key for any retailer, especially during peak shopping events when the spikes in demand can be extraordinary. With Network Intelligence Center, Tapestry can now quickly resolve any connectivity issues, cut down troubleshooting time, and ultimately improve the online shopper experience.

“As we conclude one of the most turbulent years in retail history, retail leaders across the industry are prioritizing and heavily investing in their IT systems to accelerate their digital transformations, unlocking growth and performance improvement opportunities, while quickly bringing new experiences to life,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail & Consumer at Google Cloud. “By partnering with Google Cloud and Lumen, Tapestry now has the foundation to quickly understand the performance across each of its global brands through real-time insights—and take action to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. We’re excited to partner with iconic brands like those at Tapestry and help further their digital transformational journeys.”

Google Cloud

Google Cloud provides organizations with leading infrastructure, platform capabilities and industry solutions. We deliver enterprise-grade cloud solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology to help companies operate more efficiently and adapt to changing needs, giving customers a foundation for the future. Customers in more than 150 countries turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to solve their most critical business problems.

Tapestry, Inc.

Tapestry, Inc. is a New York-based house of modern luxury lifestyle brands. The Company’s portfolio includes Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman. Our Company and our brands are founded upon a creative and consumer-led view of luxury that stands for inclusivity and approachability. Each of our brands are unique and independent, while sharing a commitment to innovation and authenticity defined by distinctive products and differentiated customer experiences across channels and geographies

Any statements in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties described in Google, Tapestry, Inc. and SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC), including each company’s most recent annual report on Form 10-K or 20-F, as applicable, and other filings with the SEC that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Google, Tapestry and SAP caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements which each company has no obligation to update and which speak only as of their dates.

STAMFORD, Conn., Dec. 07, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm, has launched a research study examining service providers that support the modernization, transformation and use of mainframe computers in enterprise settings.

The study results will be published in a comprehensive ISG Provider Lens™ report, called Mainframe Services & Solutions, scheduled to be released in April. The report will cover vendors that offer mainframe transformation and application modernization services as well as mainframe-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service offerings.

Enterprise buyers will be able to use information from the report to evaluate their current vendor relationships, potential new engagements and available offerings, while ISG advisors use the information to recommend providers to the firm’s buy-side clients.

The new report will examine a range of services offered in the mainframe space, to meet the needs of many large businesses and research organizations that require massive processing capacity, said Jan Erik Aase, director and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research.

“To comply with digital transformation business requirements, clients can modernize their mainframe applications and introduce Agile methods as well as automate continuous integration tools,” he said. “Two alternatives exist in the market: modernization, which updates legacy code, and transformation, which converts legacy code into modern languages to run on modern platforms, including private and public clouds.”

ISG has distributed surveys to more than 60 mainframe service providers. Working in collaboration with ISG’s global advisors, the research team will produce six quadrants representing the services and products the typical enterprise client is buying in the mainframe space, based on ISG’s experience working with its clients. The six quadrants that will be covered are:

Mainframe Modernization Services, covering providers offering legacy application modernization, introducing code repositories such as GitHub, DevOps integration and testing automation, including security testing. Modernization keeps the original programing language, such as Cobol, adding architecture optimization and documentation to enable agility. After the modernization is completed, clients can embrace Agile methodologies in the development and maintenance of applications running on mainframe systems.
Mainframe Transformation Services, assessing application development and maintenance service providers that have evolved their application modernization methodologies to assess and rewrite legacy programming language applications written with Cobol, RPG, Fortran, PL/1, Natural, and others, that typically run on mainframes. Typical target programming languages may include Java, .Net, C# and others, enabling the same logic and business rules to run on any platform, including the public cloud.
Mainframe-as-a-Service, examining infrastructure service providers that offer shared IBM Z mainframes under a pay-per-use contract model. Services include facilities, hardware, connectivity, mainframe network management, licensing, operating system and sub-systems, tools, and all maintenance services required to keep mainframe workloads running according to the expected performance.
Mainframe Operations, assessing traditional outsourcing providers that offer mainframe services. Typical participants employ experienced practitioners to cover legacy mainframe technologies as well most recent mainframe releases. Mainframe operation service providers offer skilled teams to keep clients’ mainframe running. Services can be delivered in any hosting facility.
Storage-as-a-Service, covering vendors of storage solutions with the commercial option of pay per use. These vendors enable clients to free their capital invested in storage systems and adopt new storage appliances or cloud-hosted storage options, or both. Vendors promise significant cost savings to clients that modernize their storage methods, with tools that dynamically move data to the most appropriate storage device and location.
Mainframe Modernization Software, enabling legacy application code assessments and code conversion. Mainframe modernization software includes reverse engineering, business logic mapping, business rules extraction, code review and inspection, documentation, emulators, frameworks and application development tools that can accelerate code and application modernization.
The report will cover the global mainframe market and also examine products and services available in the U.S. ISG analysts Pedro L. Bicudo Maschio and Srinivasan P.N. will serve as authors of the report.

A list of identified providers and vendors and further details on the study are available in this digital brochure. Companies not listed as mainframe service providers can contact ISG and ask to be included in the study.

ISG Provider Lens™ Research

The ISG Provider Lens™ Quadrant research series is the only service provider evaluation of its kind to combine empirical, data-driven research and market analysis with the real-world experience and observations of ISG’s global advisory team. Enterprises will find a wealth of detailed data and market analysis to help guide their selection of appropriate sourcing partners, while ISG advisors use the reports to validate their own market knowledge and make recommendations to ISG’s enterprise clients. The research currently covers providers offering their services globally, across Europe and Latin America, as well as in the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, the U.K., France, the Nordics, Brazil and Australia/New Zealand, with additional markets to be added in the future. For more information about ISG Provider Lens research, please visit this webpage.

A companion research series, the ISG Provider Lens Archetype reports, offer a first-of-its-kind evaluation of providers from the perspective of specific buyer types.

Starting this year, each ISG Provider Lens™ study will include a Global Summary to help enterprise subscribers better understand provider capabilities across all geographic markets covered by that study. All ISG Provider Lens™ reports also will now include an Enterprise Context feature to help executives quickly identify key insights related to their roles and responsibilities.

ISG

ISG (Information Services Group) (Nasdaq: III) is a leading global technology research and advisory firm. A trusted business partner to more than 700 clients, including more than 75 of the world’s top 100 enterprises, ISG is committed to helping corporations, public sector organizations, and service and technology providers achieve operational excellence and faster growth. The firm specializes in digital transformation services, including automation, cloud and data analytics; sourcing advisory; managed governance and risk services; network carrier services; strategy and operations design; change management; market intelligence and technology research and analysis. Founded in 2006, and based in Stamford, Conn., ISG employs more than 1,300 digital-ready professionals operating in more than 20 countries—a global team known for its innovative thinking, market influence, deep industry and technology expertise, and world-class research and analytical capabilities based on the industry’s most comprehensive marketplace data.

The Coronavirus pandemic has catapulted digital transformation to the top of the must-haves in the minds of CIOs. It has been a go-to enabler for organizations to enhance their customer experience and generate higher ROI. Businesses with brick-and-mortar presence were shifting their approach towards building a digital presence to stay relevant and ahead of their competition. Many have already begun their digital transformation journey, while some are in the designing phase. Technology landscape is dynamic in nature. While the pandemic forced businesses to adopt digital drivers such as automation, big data, digital workforce, etc., they were soon replaced with the next big wave of digital transformation. This new wave has brought in new trends that will shape up the next normal. Let’s look at 5 new such trends that will soon become the next must-haves.

Customer Experience Reimagined
It’s not just about having the best products anymore. The new wave of millennials prefers convenience over loyalty. Create digital experiences that support modern web in the form of progressive web apps, true native mobile apps with best-in-class UX, intelligent chat-bots, conversational apps, wearables, and immersive experiences that leverage augmented reality. Organizations are trying to maximize the use of components and backend integration that leads to a unified and seamless experience across channels.

The next big thing in Customer experience (CX) is to design amazing applications for any audience across any device with no limits on user experience taking full advantage of the underlying device OS for native and full power of modern browsers for web. Omni-channel tools eliminate data siloes, and bring all the data in one place. Be it a web presence, a physical store visit, or a mobile application click, omni-channel binds all customer-facing interfaces together, integrated at the back-end, and helps in better CX and data visibility across the board.

Data and User Privacy
In the wake of privacy concerns amongst digital users, we will be seeing organizations focusing on user and data privacy. This will soon become a unique selling proposition for many to leapfrog their competitors. This could mean that users in the next normal will be able to allow/deny access to their data residing on applications, web and other digital channels. The user will be the owner of his/her data. Data privacy has shaken even multi-national brethren, forcing them to comply with new regulations laid by authorities. EU has already entered the game with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance policy and other regions have followed suit.

APIs – The Road to Cloud
Cloud is already adopted by most organizations to create a seamless business continuity and fasten go-to market. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are key in building economies of scale. From converting legacy infrastructure to micro-services, APIs will help businesses to reduce data silos and create collaborative experiences. It will also help them convert scattered applications into one behemoth of a data mart, helping them in making critical business-decisions and increase their overall ROI.

XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service)
As-a-Service (aaS) has already become the norm to become a truly digital-native enterprise. The new trend in the aaS model is Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) where services rendered and delivered will completely reside on the cloud with virtual access to almost everything. Tools such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a crucial role in building those services or augmenting existing services to achieve the digital-native status quo.

AIaaS (Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service)
AI technologies are already used by 77% of consumers. A number of technological innovations such as data processing, and face & speech recognition have become possible due to AI. AI is a vast area that includes AI platforms, chat-bots, machine learning (algorithm category consisting of various libraries and frameworks), deep learning, and analytics.

AI has led to rise in the use of machine learning in computing. AI has contributed significantly in creating a framework for cloud computing. Many IT industry giants are already betting huge on AIaaS (Artificial Intelligence as a Service) with new line of services such as digital assistance, cognitive computing, machine learning, business intelligence, and so on.

These services can have a significant impact on the day-to-day lives of consumers. With the help of vital statistics from health-care organizations, AI can help identify patterns and predict the desired outcome of a given situation in a focused environment. AI can also help in tracking of smart devices, thereby, creating a footprint of individuals. It can help marketers and advertisers with predictive data on what one is likely to do in a given event. This will help marketers to show relevant ads to consumers at the right time that could help them fetch better returns for their marketing dollars.

Needless to say, the new wave of digital technology trends can reduce human interactions, increase productivity, initiate automation, and simplify lives. Organizations need to understand the importance of this technology paradigm shift, and leverage it to create digital ecosystems and become future-ready enterprises to welcome the next normal with both hands.

London, 20 October 2020 – Atos has been awarded a leading role on a new cloud computing initiative to help deliver operational efficiencies and enhance customer service for Northumbrian Water, one of the UK’s leading utility providers.

With its Microsoft Azure expertise, Atos is working alongside Northumbrian Water to migrate the first wave of three data processing and storage applications (out of circa 35 applications in the framework) to the cloud over a three-year span.

This is the first of several frameworks to be awarded under an extensive digital transformation initiative that stretches across Northumbrian Water’s operations.

Northumbrian Water will benefit from improved agility, flexibility and control and, as a result of the programme, will be able to deliver enhanced customer experience. The project will therefore increase the reliability of delivering sustainable clean water to over 4.5 million households across the whole of their company supply area which comprises the Northumbrian, Essex and Suffolk regions of England. It will also help Northumbrian Water drive down operating costs and improve overall efficiency by deploying cloud services across the organisation.

Martin Jackson, Head of Strategy and Product Management at Northumbrian Water, said: “Atos demonstrated that it both shares our values and had the ability to provide a compelling solution, combining a strong UK team on the ground with the experience of delivering similar successful projects. We are looking forward to working closely with Atos team over the term of the contract.”

Andy Corkhill, Vice President Energy & Utilities, Atos UK & Ireland, said: “As the new preferred partner of Northumbrian Water for the first wave of applications on the Cloud Migration Framework, this project will be the anchor in the first stages of delivering successful digital transformation, both through the framework and first wave of applications. An agile and efficient utilities sector is vital to the UK, and embracing digitisation is pivotal in providing a sustainable, focused service for our customers in a digital society.”

Steve George, Client Partner, Energy and Utilities at Atos, said: “Migrating data processing and storage to the cloud will help Northumbrian Water enhance security and ensure future scalability, whilst also becoming more operationally efficient. This project, and the wider digital transformation of utilities, will ultimately enable consumers to benefit from more efficient suppliers, improved resilience and customer service.”

Having been selected as the preferred partner for the first wave on the Cloud Migration Framework, Atos has worked closely with the IS team at Northumbrian Water on the migration process of the intial 3 applications.

Overview: A Three-Way Partnership for Enterprise DevOps

In November 2019, CloudBees announced a strategic partnership with Atos and VMware aimed at helping enterprise organisations adopt DevOps best practices at scale. The combined offering was delivered through Atos Digital Hybrid Cloud (DHC), powered by VMware Tanzu (formerly VMware Enterprise PKS) and the CloudBees cloud-native CI/CD platform.

The partnership was positioned as an industry first — combining a large global managed service provider (Atos), a leading cloud infrastructure platform (VMware), and an enterprise CI/CD specialist (CloudBees) into a single, integrated managed service for software delivery.

What Problem Does This Partnership Solve?

Many enterprises undergoing digital transformation struggle with the same core challenges:

• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines requires significant internal investment and specialist skills.
• Adopting DevOps culture and tooling while keeping existing traditional applications running is complex.
• Scaling software delivery across large engineering organisations — with diverse application portfolios, from monoliths to microservices — introduces operational overhead.
• Managing Kubernetes infrastructure at enterprise scale demands dedicated platform engineering expertise.

The Atos DHC managed service, powered by CloudBees and VMware, was designed to offload much of this complexity to a trusted managed service provider, allowing development teams to focus on delivering software rather than maintaining delivery infrastructure.

What Each Partner Brings to the Table

Each of the three partners contributed distinct capabilities to the combined offering:

CloudBees Core

CloudBees Core (now part of the broader CloudBees CI product family) provided a centrally managed, shared CI/CD service with self-service capabilities for individual engineering teams. Key characteristics included:

• Enterprise-grade Jenkins-based CI/CD pipelines with centralised governance.
• Self-service project provisioning so teams could onboard without waiting for platform administrators.
• Cloud-native platform support for VMware PKS (Kubernetes).

Atos Application Transformation Services

Atos contributed managed services expertise and its Digital Hybrid Cloud platform, which provided:

• Application modernisation consulting and delivery — helping teams move from traditional deployment models to cloud-native approaches.
• Managed operations for the combined platform, reducing the internal engineering burden on customer organisations.
• A trusted global service provider relationship for enterprises that need contractual SLAs and support at scale.

VMware Enterprise PKS (Now VMware Tanzu)

VMware Enterprise PKS provided the Kubernetes infrastructure layer underpinning the platform. Key features included:

• Kubernetes-as-a-service with high availability and cluster scaling.
• Automated health checks and self-healing cluster management.
• Rolling upgrades to reduce downtime during platform maintenance.
• A turnkey solution designed for enterprise operational requirements rather than DIY Kubernetes setups.

Key Quotes from the Announcement

Francois Dechery, Chief Strategy Officer, CloudBees:

“As forward-looking organisations continue to focus on digital transformation initiatives, they are increasingly seeking assistance from trusted service providers for the management of their DevOps operations. This partnership represents a true industry first. By combining the power of a large managed service provider and a leading global cloud provider with our CI/CD solution, we’re helping customers to more effectively and efficiently modernise.”

Michael Kollar, Senior Vice President for Cloud Engineering, Atos:

“Using our Atos Digital Hybrid Cloud, powered by CloudBees, organisations can harness the power of DevOps, to transform application development methods from a traditional approach to a model that leverages the efficiencies of the cloud and the convenience of a managed service.”

Susan Nash, Senior Vice President, Business Development, VMware:

“DevOps is an important new way to develop applications. As it becomes more pervasive, many companies are struggling to try to adopt the DevOps culture, along with automating core software delivery processes. Working together, we are able to deliver a fully-managed software delivery solution that will enable companies to develop and deliver software faster, with less overhead and with far less friction.”

Why This Partnership Mattered for DevOps Teams

The significance of this announcement in 2019 was primarily about reducing the barrier to enterprise-scale DevOps adoption. Rather than requiring organisations to independently integrate CI/CD tooling, Kubernetes infrastructure, and application modernisation services, the three-way partnership offered a pre-integrated, managed stack.

For DevOps engineers and platform teams evaluating such offerings, the practical value lay in:

• Reduced integration risk: CloudBees CI/CD was already validated against VMware PKS, removing a significant compatibility testing burden.
• Managed operations: Atos provided operational management of the platform, which is particularly valuable for enterprises without large internal platform engineering teams.
• Support for heterogeneous application portfolios: The stack was explicitly designed to support both traditional applications and modern microservice-based architectures in the same delivery pipeline.
• Enterprise contractual guarantees: A managed service model with a major global system integrator (Atos) provides procurement and compliance pathways that pure SaaS or DIY solutions often lack.

Context: The Broader Market Shift

This partnership reflected a broader industry trend in 2019 and 2020: the convergence of CI/CD platforms, Kubernetes infrastructure, and managed service providers into integrated DevOps offerings. Enterprises were increasingly looking to reduce the operational complexity of maintaining their own DevOps toolchains, driving demand for fully managed, opinionated stacks built on proven components.

VMware’s subsequent rebranding of PKS to VMware Tanzu and its broader Tanzu portfolio expansion also reflected this shift, positioning VMware as a platform for enterprise Kubernetes management rather than just a virtualisation vendor.

For teams evaluating modern DevOps platform strategies, this type of partnership model — integrating CI/CD, Kubernetes, and managed operations — remains highly relevant as organisations balance build-versus-buy decisions for their delivery infrastructure.

The CIO’s Challenge: Keeping Pace with Transformation

Digital Transformation does not happen uniformly across an enterprise. Different business units, platforms, and teams evolve at different speeds, creating a complex, dynamic environment that CIOs must manage simultaneously. The core challenge is orchestrating these varied changes without disrupting existing operations or introducing unacceptable levels of risk.

Release control and deployment automation are two of the most effective tools CIOs have for managing this complexity. Together, they allow organizations to progress through Digital Transformation one release at a time — steadily, auditably, and with reduced operational risk. This incremental approach is increasingly recognized as the new normal for enterprise IT.

Continuous Delivery as an Enterprise Practice

Continuous delivery is a relatively modern approach to releasing software that emphasizes continuous improvement, continuous integration, and frequent, reliable deployments. For enterprises, adopting continuous delivery means rethinking how releases are planned, executed, and governed across the organization.

Automation is at the heart of this model. Automating delivery pipelines accelerates the availability of high-performance applications — but automation done poorly simply accelerates errors. Successful continuous delivery automation depends on first standardizing your release and deployment processes. Without standardization, automation compounds inconsistency rather than eliminating it.

When executed well, continuous delivery directly supports business goals by enabling IT to deliver high-quality software at the speed the business demands, not at the slower cadence of traditional waterfall or manual release cycles.

What Enterprise Release Control and Deployment Automation Must Deliver

Not all release management and deployment automation tools are created equal. Enterprise-grade solutions must be flexible enough to span multiple development frameworks, platforms, and methodologies — from legacy mainframe systems to modern cloud-native architectures. Specifically, capable tooling should:

• Provide audit-compliant visibility — full insight into the entire continuous delivery pipeline for governance and compliance reporting
• Support end-to-end release lifecycle management — including planning, tracking, and controlling all stages from development through deployment
• Coordinate releases across distributed teams — enabling geographically dispersed teams to work in sync without process friction
• Enable automation from mainframe to cloud — not just for greenfield projects but across heterogeneous legacy and modern environments
• Standardize and automate deployment — reducing both the risk and duration of each release cycle
• Support hybrid and multi-cloud environments — deploying and maintaining applications seamlessly across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure

Aligning DevOps with Business Objectives

A common failure mode for DevOps programs is treating continuous delivery as a purely technical initiative. For DevOps to truly enable Digital Transformation, IT leadership must deeply understand business goals and design delivery pipelines that serve those goals directly.

Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive in a well-orchestrated DevOps environment. The goal is not simply to release faster — it is to deliver continuous innovation reliably, with governance and observability built into the process. When release control and deployment automation are properly aligned with business objectives, IT can move at the pace of business rather than acting as a bottleneck to it.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and IT Leaders

• Digital Transformation requires IT to deliver faster and with lower operational risk — DevOps provides the framework to do both.
• Release control and deployment automation are essential bridging mechanisms between traditional IT and fully continuous delivery.
• Standardizing release and deployment processes is a prerequisite for effective automation — automate consistency, not chaos.
• Enterprise tooling must span legacy and modern platforms to be genuinely useful across the organization.
• Governance and audit compliance are not obstacles to DevOps; they are capabilities that mature DevOps practices build in from the start.
• Aligning continuous delivery with business goals — not just technical metrics — is what makes DevOps transformative rather than merely operational.

This article draws on themes originally published at cio.com. The original source article is not directly linked in the reference material.

Why Culture Is the Hardest Part of DevOps

When organisations embark on a DevOps transformation, the instinct is to focus on tooling: CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and monitoring stacks. These are visible, purchasable, and measurable. Culture is none of those things, which is exactly why it is so often deprioritised—and why so many transformations fall short of their goals.

You cannot buy a DevOps culture. DevOps demands that people, process, and tools work in concert. Invest only in tools and you automate dysfunction rather than eliminate it. Research from organisations such as Google Cloud and Harvard Business Review has consistently reinforced this point: DevOps initiatives that neglect the human dimension rarely deliver the business outcomes they promise.

Large-scale organisational change is inherently uncomfortable. Leaders must stake their professional reputations on a transformation vision. Employees face uncertainty about their roles, their skills, and their futures. Resistance is not irrational—it is a predictable human response to ambiguity. Addressing that ambiguity through sustained, honest communication is therefore not an optional add-on; it is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Communicate Every Step of the Way

Professional identities form over years. A developer who has spent a decade mastering a particular workflow, or an operations engineer whose entire value has been defined by manual release gates, cannot be expected to reorient overnight. Before you roll out a single new tool or process, cultivate genuine empathy for what your employees are experiencing.

Employees going through a DevOps transformation are typically wrestling with questions such as:

• How will my day-to-day responsibilities change when new processes are in place?
• Is my role at risk once more tasks are automated?
• What skills will I need, and how will I be supported in developing them?
• How will my performance be evaluated in this new way of working?

Anticipate these questions rather than waiting for them to surface as resentment. Proactively share both the questions and the answers with the entire team, not just managers. When people see that leadership has already considered their concerns, trust increases and resistance decreases.

Critically, your communication strategy must reach beyond development and operations teams. A DevOps transformation touches application delivery across the whole organisation. Marketing may need to revise campaign timelines to align with faster release cycles. HR must understand new role definitions and hiring profiles. Finance needs visibility into shifting cost models. Hold cross-functional meetings regularly, listen actively for pain points, and address issues in real time. A transformation that only talks to engineering will quietly create friction everywhere else.

Measure What Matters

Benchmarking against industry peers can be useful for setting initial targets, but the metrics that drive your transformation forward are the ones tied to your specific business goals. If your primary objective is faster, safer software delivery, your metrics should illuminate the health of your delivery pipeline—not simply validate that you are keeping up with competitors.

Identifying meaningful metrics starts with understanding how your current processes drive behaviour. Ask probing questions:

• What corners are being cut to hit a deployment deadline?
• Does accelerating one team’s throughput create bottlenecks or quality problems for other teams?
• Are the metrics we track today changing how people behave—for better or worse?
• Do our pipeline metrics reflect real-world delivery quality, or are they masking problems?

Common DevOps metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore (MTTR), and change failure rate (popularised by the DORA research programme) are strong starting points precisely because they are outcome-oriented rather than activity-oriented. They measure the health of the system, not just the busyness of individuals.

Metrics should not live only in dashboards. Bring them into the regular cross-functional meetings described above. When employees see a direct line between their daily work and the numbers that matter to the business, two things happen: engagement increases, and the quality of the data improves, because people on the ground will surface discrepancies that no automated report would catch.

Practical Steps for Leading a Culture-First DevOps Transformation

Putting culture at the centre of your DevOps programme is not a soft aspiration—it requires deliberate, repeatable practices. Consider the following approach:

1. Define and communicate a clear transformation vision. Articulate what success looks like in concrete terms—faster releases, fewer production incidents, reduced toil—and explain why it matters to both the business and to individuals.
2. Establish psychological safety. People must feel safe to raise concerns, admit failures, and experiment without fear of blame. Blameless post-mortems are a proven mechanism for building this culture.
3. Invest in learning and upskilling. Budget time and money for training, communities of practice, and experimentation. Automation anxiety fades when people have the skills to work alongside automated systems.
4. Create feedback loops at every level. Retrospectives, one-on-ones, and town halls are not bureaucratic overhead—they are the mechanisms through which a transformation self-corrects.
5. Celebrate incremental wins. Transformation is a marathon. Recognising small milestones keeps momentum alive and demonstrates that progress is real.
6. Align incentives with the transformation goals. If performance reviews still reward individual heroics over team collaboration, your culture programme will fight an uphill battle. Review and adjust how people are measured and rewarded.

Conclusion

A DevOps transformation touches staffing, organisational structure, performance management, and culture simultaneously. That scope makes it one of the most complex change programmes a technology organisation can undertake. The companies that succeed are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated toolchains—they are the ones that bring their entire organisation along for the journey.

By establishing transparent communication channels, choosing metrics that reflect real business outcomes, and investing consistently in the people behind the processes, you build the cultural foundation that makes every technical improvement sustainable. Communicate the vision relentlessly, measure what genuinely matters, and treat culture as a first-class engineering concern—not an afterthought.

The Cloud Visibility Problem

Cloud adoption is no longer optional for most enterprises — but the shift to virtualized infrastructure introduces a visibility gap that many organizations are only beginning to acknowledge. According to an Ixia study on virtualization, only 37% of organizations monitored their virtual environments at the same level as their physical networks. That means the majority of businesses are operating with significantly less insight into what is happening inside their virtual infrastructure than they had in on-premises environments.

Jeff Harris, then VP of Solutions Marketing at Ixia, framed the risk clearly: “Most organisations cannot take that chance, so they need to bridge the visibility gap quickly. Visibility will enable better control, to maintain security no matter where their data goes and, of course, to ensure reliability of their core business applications.”

Why Virtual Environments Are Harder to Monitor

In physical networks, traffic monitoring is relatively straightforward: taps or SPAN ports on physical switches capture traffic and send it to monitoring, analytics, and security tools. In virtualized environments, the challenge is compounded by the volume and nature of internal traffic.

Internal east-west traffic — communication between virtual machines, containers, and services within the same data center — typically accounts for around 80% of total traffic in virtual data centers. Much of this traffic never leaves the host, making it invisible to traditional network monitoring tools positioned at the perimeter.

Virtual network taps address this by sending traffic copies to monitoring and security tools. However, without intelligent filtering, the result can be a flood of data that overwhelms downstream tools. The goal is to identify and extract the most relevant traffic efficiently, not to mirror everything indiscriminately.

Four Key Areas for Deploying Virtual Network Taps Effectively

Ixia identified four areas that organizations should address when deploying virtual taps to ensure meaningful, granular access to critical application traffic across virtualized networks.

1. Horizontal Scalability

Virtual environments grow rapidly — new VMs spin up, user counts increase, and data volumes expand, often without much notice. Virtual network taps must be able to scale horizontally to keep pace with this growth without requiring manual IT intervention each time the environment changes.

Ideally, taps should scale automatically in response to traffic volume increases and new workloads, while having zero impact on the performance of monitored applications. If a monitoring solution becomes a bottleneck, teams will be tempted to disable or bypass it — defeating the purpose entirely.

2. Visibility Across Network Segments (“Securing in the Dark”)

Virtual firewalls are commonly used to segment virtualized networks — isolating workloads, enforcing compliance boundaries, and limiting lateral movement in the event of a breach. This segmentation is valuable for security, but it creates blind spots: traffic flowing between segments may not be visible to monitoring or security tools unless the taps are explicitly designed to operate across segment boundaries.

Virtual taps must be capable of capturing inter-segment traffic to ensure that security policies governing each network segment are actually being enforced. Without this visibility, an attacker moving laterally between segments could go undetected.

3. Container Environment Support

Container adoption has grown substantially alongside virtual machine usage, and containers introduce their own visibility challenges. Container lifecycles are short — containers may exist for seconds or minutes — and inter-container communication often bypasses traditional network monitoring points entirely.

Virtual taps must be able to capture traffic within container environments, especially when an organization uses container-based virtualization to boost application performance or density. Monitoring solutions that cannot see into container networking leave a significant portion of application traffic unobserved.

4. DevOps Elasticity and Continuous Deployment Compatibility

Modern DevOps practices mean that new builds, updated services, and changed configurations are deployed continuously across virtual environments. Individual VMs, containers, and microservices now have shorter lifespans than ever, and the topology of a virtual environment can shift significantly between deployments.

This creates a specific risk: a deployment pipeline should never be able to inadvertently take a virtual tap offline or block the traffic path it is monitoring. Monitoring infrastructure must be resilient to — and aware of — rapid changes in the environment, automatically updating its view of the current state without human intervention.

The Takeaway: Visibility and Cloud Speed Are Not Mutually Exclusive

A common misconception is that achieving deep visibility in cloud and virtual environments requires sacrificing the agility and cost benefits that motivated cloud adoption in the first place. Harris argued against this tradeoff: “With the right architecture they can have both.”

The architecture he described is environment-agnostic — capable of monitoring traffic across VMs, containers, and multi-cloud environments — and elastically scalable, distributing relevant traffic intelligently to analytics, security, and compliance tools rather than flooding them with everything.

For DevOps and platform engineering teams, the practical implication is that monitoring and visibility should be treated as first-class infrastructure concerns, built into the platform from the start rather than bolted on after incidents occur. The four areas above — scalability, cross-segment visibility, container support, and deployment resilience — provide a useful checklist for evaluating whether a virtual tap or network visibility solution is truly fit for a modern, dynamic cloud environment.

Summary Checklist

• Horizontal scale: Can the solution grow automatically without manual intervention or performance impact?
• Cross-segment visibility: Can virtual taps capture traffic flowing between network segments created by virtual firewalls?
• Container support: Does the solution monitor traffic inside container environments, not just VM-to-VM traffic?
• DevOps resilience: Will continuous deployments and infrastructure changes leave monitoring intact and current?