Most organizations don’t wake up one morning and decide to overhaul how they manage messaging and streaming. The shift usually begins with something far less glamorous: a delayed release because a queue wasn’t provisioned on time, a compliance reviewer asking for audit evidence that takes days to assemble, or that familiar moment in a war room when everyone realizes the issue is happening somewhere among five different platforms—and no one has the full picture. These incidents are usually dismissed as “part of the job,” but they accumulate. Eventually, the realization sets in: the organization is operating its most critical digital plumbing through fragmented tools, tribal knowledge, spreadsheets, and luck.
The middleware environments of large organizations have become too difficult to manage conventionally due to platform proliferation—MQ, Kafka, Solace, RabbitMQ, and more. This fragmentation creates operational chaos, unsustainable workloads, and dangerous blind spots in risk and compliance, leading to hidden costs like infrastructure waste and slow incident resolution. But there’s a way out. A new operational model is emerging—lean operations—that allows organizations to run their messaging and streaming estates with far more efficiency, resilience, and auditability than ever before.