It’s time to up-level central IT to SRE skill levels
An SRE is an expert who is responsible for how applications run on underlying infrastructure. These individuals have the skill set to identify where slowdowns are occurring and why, recommend appropriate changes, and create automation to avoid the problem in the future.
Forrester Research has found that a strong majority of organizations are moving to an SRE strategy. The reason, according to Forrester analyst Brent Ellis, is that adoption of DevOps in cloud-native, automated, and containerized environments has created high levels of complexity. And while IT admins specialize in managing order, SREs are adept at managing this complexity.
Traditionally, central IT staff members have been limited to monitoring applications and infrastructure to identify incidents and then submitting tickets to subject matter experts, possibly SREs, for remediation. The skills and responsibilities of IT teams therefore have been somewhat narrow. And although it might seem that only an individual with exceptional software development skills could qualify as an SRE, Ellis sees IT administrators as able to take on these tasks.
The key, he explains, is to provide IT admins with effective observability tools. “The future lies in site reliability engineering [SRE], not in infrastructure administration,” Ellis says. “Making this transition isn’t easy; enterprises need help to transition existing IT administrators into site reliability engineers.”2
Ready to move your IT admins over to SRE-based practices and skills? Join Brent Ellis, senior analyst for Forrester Research, as he discusses why and how to move IT admins to SRE skills so you can move your team forward and drive application velocity.
Implementing an SRE strategy — and moving IT admins into SRE roles — requires a fresh mindset, Ellis maintains: “You have to change the way people think about the work they are doing. Having a customer/product focus is very important.” Despite challenges, the analyst asserts that the payoff of a broad SRE strategy promises to be significant:
Productivity is likely to improve as SREs focus on the business results of application development and the experience of the users who work with the applications.
Reliability should increase as IT admins transition from monitoring to observing, which will enable them to shift from a reactive to a predictive stance.
Capacity management and scalability speed should improve as IT admins leverage observability metrics to adapt to infrastructure requirements.
Lower-cost OpenTelemetry-based observability tools will help broaden usage to central IT staff. According to the Foundry MarketPulse report, 63% of IT decision-makers said the high cost of tools is a barrier to extending usage more broadly. Moreover, such tools should be less complex and more intuitive for use by the broader population of central IT teams. IT leaders would welcome the shift to broader utilization. The MarketPulse report finds that 58% expect that doing so would improve incident response while 58% expect to see better performance optimization.
2 How To Transition Your IT Admins To Become Site Reliability Engineers, Forrester Research, Inc., August 8, 2023.
