Technology companies today face a number of challenges related to attracting and retaining talented employees.
Highly sought-after skilled workers are increasingly expecting the flexibility of hybrid and remote work environments, while still receiving office-like support from their employers. Many of these same employees also expect their employers to be environmentally conscious. Younger generations, in particular, say they would be willing to earn less to work at a sustainable company.
Providing both support in a distributed workplace and cultural alignment on eco-conscious values will be key for organizations looking to remain competitive in the year ahead. Prioritizing the employee experience and ESG efforts also stands to benefit both employer and employee, with research suggesting companies that embrace sustainability attract better talent and have longer retention, which increases productivity and business performance.
In 2023, one surprising way that companies can reduce their environmental impact and provide remote work technology and networks that enable employees to efficiently do their jobs is by increasing visibility into their environments by adopting observability.
What Is Observability?
Observability provides visibility across distributed, hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage complex IT environments easily.
Observability Reduces Environmental Impact
Databases — whether hosted in on-premises facilities or in the cloud — play a fundamental role in organizations’ day-to-day IT operations. They ensure high-performing and highly available networks, applications and environments exist for employees to do their jobs and for customers to enjoy a company’s products.
Unfortunately for planet earth, global emissions from data centers that support these databases range from 2.5 percent to 3.7 percent of all global greenhouse gasses. To put that in perspective, commercial flights account for about 2.4 percent! One of the reasons these databases end up being such energy hogs is because many are still running under- or unused legacy applications or systems that are inherently energy inefficient.
Modern observability solutions provide database administrators with single-pane-of-glass visibility, regardless of a company’s infrastructure, enabling them to easily map the performance of applications and systems. Database performance analysis and tuning capabilities then enable organizations to identify and eliminate redundant or underused applications and systems, which in turn reduces computing power and energy consumption.
What Is Single-Pane-of-Glass Visibility?
A single-pane-of-glass visibility solution centralized dashboard view providing an at-a-glance overview across complex distributed systems.
In addition to reducing energy use, these tools can enable companies to reduce physical waste. By eliminating unnecessary computing processes for on-premises data center hardware, companies can prolong the life cycle of that hardware.
Some estimates suggest that observability can lead companies to experience a 10 percent energy reduction, an attractive statistic for environmentally conscious employees that also comes with significant monetary savings.
Observability Improves Life for Distributed Employees
In the post-pandemic world, at least some level of remote work flexibility is a top priority. Hybrid workplaces are typical of organizations that hope to attract and retain skilled employees. According to recent research, however, managing the infrastructure needed to support a hybrid and remote workforce by ensuring their applications and data are accessible from anywhere is becoming more difficult. The result is remote workplaces in which processes as simple as handling an IT ticket have become unnecessarily difficult and frustrating experiences.
Part of the problem is that today’s distributed employees rely more heavily on infrastructure outside of IT’s control — such as commercial internet access — in addition to various remote work tools, software and custom applications to get work done. Modern, flexible observability solutions provide IT staff comprehensive visibility into these dispersed workplaces to identify application and tool outages and performance bottlenecks. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that power these solutions help remediate and prevent future problems, ensuring employees have access to the resources they need to do their jobs.
By combining these observability functions with ITSM services, organizations can help ensure employees have access to the same quality of service they would receive in the office, eliminating staff frustration and the need for employees to contact peers or bypass their IT service desk for support. The stakes for providing workplace flexibility while delivering exceptional, office-like support to employees are high, as doing so can directly correlate to staff retention, satisfaction productivity, and overall business performance.
The next generation of technology leaders will demand workplace flexibility with strong support of their IT teams and a commitment to protecting the earth. By implementing observability, companies can become greener and provide excellent remote and hybrid workplaces and in turn, appeal to a broader pool of talent that empowers future success.
