ETR Insights presents an interview with the IT Solutions Architect for a large financial services enterprise, who discusses their company’s need for more advanced tools and dashboarding options, and the importance of engaging employees with cutting-edge projects and not overworking staff. The interview details this company’s mix of on-premise and cloud solutions, how they are centralizing user onboarding with SailPoint, and why they feel Microsoft Project is unfairly maligned. Read on for more on Microsoft SQL, Power BI, Tableau, Jira, Fortinet, and WhatsUp Gold.
Vendor-Specific Commentary – Observability, Analytics, Security + Productivity
Monitoring, logging, and observability. Our guest has experience with Splunk, New Relic, and Elastic, and hopes that his organization will soon adopt these or other advanced monitoring tools with dashboarding options. “Right now, we’re still using homegrown tools, but we need something that has an enterprise view of things, so I'm really pushing for that.” While they haven't yet reached a POC stage, our guest hopes to evaluate the vendors mentioned and various other vendors, including SolarWinds and WhatsUp Gold. “Even ManageEngine, they’re a smaller player, but they have some good tools.” They are pushing the organization to consider options beyond common Gartner recommendations. “[We need to be] looking at what other people are using and how good it is, actually, because not everything is right for everybody.”
ETR Data: The model above shows Net Score trends for Elastic, Splunk, New Relic, and WhatsUp Gold within the Analytics / B.I. / Big Data sector for the most recent OCT23 Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS). In sequential surveys, monitoring and observability vendors continue to see their spending intentions slide. Elastic remains most resilient and still registers a relatively healthy Net Score at 36%. Datadog and Dynatrace take two different routes to arrive in a tie for second, with Datadog accelerating recent declines and Dynatrace capturing a material rebound in spending intent this survey. Splunk respondents indicated further deceleration and New Relic's Net Score captured a more severe drop on a year-over-year basis. Meanwhile, WhatsUp’s Net Score remains mired in negative territory.
Database + data warehousing. This organization uses a mix of on-premise and cloud co-lo solutions, akin to Rackspace but is in the process of moving its data center to a new vendor. They are primarily a Microsoft SQL shop but are also using Oracle and Oracle Cloud for some back-end database tasks. “Just for the legacy Oracle, like HR stuff. That's pretty much what Oracle is useful for. Anything that's pretty much on-site, even the BI and analytics stuff, that’s all basically Microsoft SQL.” The company has integrated Power BI with other visualization tools like Tableau (Salesforce) for dashboard creation and data visualization.
Productivity + project management. Our guest defends Microsoft Project as a useful tool, despite its reputation for being clunky and dated. “I’ve seen and heard that there is perhaps this intimidation around using [Microsoft] Project, but it’s easy to use and simple, no different than Smartsheet. It looks like a behemoth, but it's easy to use.” They mention Jira as another easy-to-use project management solution. He appreciates O365’s standardization, particularly in terms of auto-saving, cloud backups, and keeping everyone on the same version of applications like Excel. Though used inconsistently through the organization currently, this IT architect would eventually like to support Smartsheet as formally as the company does Jira and Microsoft Project.
Information Security Projects. Our guest is currently focused on the importance of network segmentation for security purposes and discussed the implementation of firewalls and policies, as well as the increasing use of SD-WAN technology, where his company uses the multi-purpose vendor Fortinet for its scalability and stability. “As a bank, you’ve got a ton of branches, so you’ve got to make sure that you can manage that tool across all assets.”
The organization is actively working on numerous other security projects, including vulnerability and patch management, centralizing user onboarding with tools like SailPoint and its associated API integrations, managing a transition from EDR to XDR with CrowdStrike, and updating Oracle and other tools with a single sign-on solution. “We’ve got to be careful that we're not duplicating products. What happens with security, you have this product doing this and that product doing that – [such as firewalls, antivirus software, and vulnerability management] - and you find they all kind of can do the same thing if you just turn another option on.”
Regarding the security vendor portfolio, this company has implemented RSA, is presently working with Netskope, and uses a mixture of Rapid7, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft for patching and oversight of users, systems, and servers. Our guest highlighted the need for better access control and auditing capabilities while making sure that layered security products don’t slow the business users down.
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