Partner Perspective: Application Rationalization Combined with a Move Towards Zero Trust Will Improve Chances of Network Stability

All the fancy apps in the world won’t do users a bit of good if the network is down. And, in fact, sometimes having a bunch of fancy apps from different vendors introduces the type of complexity that makes it more likely the network will, in fact, go down. So it’s no surprise that a huge trend among CIOs today is application rationalization. It’s one of a number of initiatives that look to drive towards simplicity in the IT ecosystem and, in the process, give CIOs and CISOs a better chance of keeping the lights on.

All the fancy apps in the world won’t do users a bit of good if the network is down. And, in fact, sometimes having a bunch of fancy apps from different vendors introduces the type of complexity that makes it more likely the network will, in fact, go down. So it’s no surprise that a huge trend among CIOs today is application rationalization. It’s one of a number of initiatives that look to drive towards simplicity in the IT ecosystem and, in the process, give CIOs and CISOs a better chance of keeping the lights on. But maintaining network stability goes beyond that, according to Rob Johnson, WW VP & Global Head of Solutions Engineering with SolarWinds, who explains that another key is obtaining the type of visualization that allows for an understanding of where interconnectivity between applications lies. The Holy Grail? Layering on top of that visualization AI and ML to automate the process of rectifying problematic anomalies (yes, not all anomalies are problematic). In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Johnson covers these issues and many more.

Bold Statements

… if you don’t have a strong change management process, if you’ve got a poor incident management process and your teams don’t have a clear set of procedures for identifying and reporting and resolving issues, your problems are going to escalate.

… if you can put performance metrics in where you can see the response times, the uptime and the throughput, you can identify the degraded performance before it’s even impacting the user for timely optimization, then you’re in really good shape.

… there’s a bunch of advancements in telemedicine, as an example, and mobile health and other tech apps. But what that does is it expands the potential attack service for cyber threats, because now you’re having to secure the personal information, and it’s much more challenging.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s Partner Perspective Interview Series. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Today, we’re talking with Rob Johnson, Worldwide VP and Global Head of Solutions Engineering with SolarWinds. Rob, thanks for joining me.

Rob: Hey Anthony, it’s an absolute pleasure to be with you today. Thanks for inviting me.

Anthony: You’re very welcome. Looking forward to having a fun chat. You want to start off by telling me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Rob: I would love to. I’ll talk to you from the perspective of our customers – specifically the IT buyer, aka the CIO and their team of IT practitioners, especially those in the healthcare. They’ve got multiple challenges to contend with, the top three, typically – too many software tools, constraints due to resourcing, expertise, and budgets, and then just that intense complexity and managing data across the multiple silos. So those challenges really are what drive our organization and what my role is all about.

So SolarWinds gives companies worldwide – regardless of their type, size, or level of complexity – the ability to visualize, observe, remediate, and automate their entire IT infrastructure, no matter where that infrastructure resides. So we’ve got about 2,000 people around the world maintaining the trust that customers put in us to provide them with the abi...