What makes your business competitive with others just like it around the world? It isn’t just the time you put into it or the quality of your product. Those things are important, but what lets you reach new customers anywhere you want to reach?
Technology. It’s the key to unlimited business reach and growth. Look at companies like Apple and Microsoft, who built industry-leading companies on the backs of making it easier for businesses like yours to run. By inventing new technologies, they made it possible for your business to grow and thrive in ways previously unheard of.
We are at the point again where a change in the way that businesses operate, a paradigm shift, is about to occur. This time, AI for IT operations is about to change business operations forever by resolving one of the biggest problems businesses have: IT operations automation.
As your business continues to grow, you may find yourself struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of IT operations. AIOps is emerging as a powerful solution for streamlining IT operations. By leveraging AIOps, you can reduce manual labor, improve productivity, reduce costs, and revitalize IT infrastructure management.
What is AIOps?
AIOps stands for Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations. These IT solutions automate various processes throughout your company. The goal of AIOps is to automate many of the processes associated with IT operations, such as incident management, problem resolution, and performance monitoring.
For example, incident management is one of the most critical yet difficult tasks that IT teams face simply because there are so many incidents to manage. Company computer systems are constantly bombarded by threats, and every possible incursion must be investigated and addressed. That means your IT team has its hands full with just one task.
What if they could get help with investigating, documenting, and closing security gaps for each incident? Now, imagine if they could do this without adding more personnel and handle incidents in a fraction of the time that it normally takes with the help of machine learning for IT operations. The benefits are numerous and are possible with automation powered by AIOps.
AIOps can detect patterns in data points across different systems so that predictive insights can be drawn from the data. For instance, it might alert you when there’s a potential security threat or when an application is down due to a server issue. Pointing IT resources in the right direction is half of the battle, and your IT team can save a lot of time on tasks when much of the background work is already handled for them.
[Read more about the benefits of Optimizing SRE with AIOps]
Benefits of leveraging AIOps
AI is likely the next big toolset that can change how businesses and many other organizations work. While still a relatively new technology, there can be tremendous benefits and competitive advantages for companies that leverage AIOps. These include:
Predict business disruptions early
AIOps can help predict and prevent potential disruptions before they become a problem by analyzing large amounts of data from multiple sources and detecting anomalies or patterns that could indicate an issue.
Take, for example, a glitch in a server. That glitch could cause the server to go offline, limiting the work that some of your business teams can do. Servers are hardy pieces of hardware, but they do experience problems. AIOps can monitor server performance and detect anomalies that indicate potential problems, such as slowdowns in data transmission. A pattern of slowdowns may mean something is wrong with the server, and it needs to be backed up to another one, just in case.
It can then take proactive action to fix the issue before it becomes a major disruption, such as initiating a data backup for that server in case it goes down. It can also point IT teams to the server for maintenance or further root cause analysis.
[Read about Facebook 100 million dollar outage and the advantages of AIOps in incident management]
Reduce time spent on mundane and repetitive tasks
AIOps can also provide insight into how to optimize operations for maximum efficiency.
Business operations is a complex balance of improving performance and minimizing costs and other problems. To truly get the best performance, large-scale data analytics are needed to find ways that will produce sustainable performance improvements. With AIOps, automated systems can be established to collect and crunch data faster than any human could. It lets managers assess performance on a scale that is previously unheard of, and businesses can benefit from the results.
Make more informed decisions
The technology can also provide valuable insights into how users interact with applications or networks so that you can make informed decisions about changes or upgrades that need to be made in order to improve performance and user experience.
Without AIOps, IT managers spend a lot of time on data log management to find the most important insights or conclusions. Using this approach, it is understandable that key insights might be missed.
Enjoy a simplified dashboard
IT operations that involve monitoring or performance management are notoriously complex. This is largely due to the fact that data is segmented, and the reports that people rely on are segmented, too. This means a lot of different dashboards and systems to understand exactly what is happening in a business.
With new technologies, it is possible to synthesize all of those different data centers into one comprehensive dashboard to make data management and analysis much easier.
AIOps simplifies the process of managing multiple IT systems by aggregating all related data into a single dashboard or interface for easy access and analysis. This simplifies complex operations into manageable tasks that are easier to understand and complete quickly without sacrificing accuracy or quality of results.
Typically, IT infrastructure becomes more complex and complicated as companies scale. In many cases, older, legacy tools and data could hinder the scalability of companies due to the need for system overhauls, adjustments, and manual recalibrations. AIOps can work to change this by aggregating data from different systems.
Collect and process data automatically
Businesses thrive on data and the more that they can collect, the better decisions leaders make. Using AIOps to automatically collect and process data from different sources is an effective way to provide businesses with the information needed to thrive in tough markets.
AIOps is also effective in processing data based on what is found. Automating your data architecture not only reduces the time needed to manage data resources but also makes it possible to increase efficiency across your entire business network. Having all of your data collection processes automated under a single system lets that system work seamlessly and faster.
Improve IT security
The biggest threat to IT security is system users. They tend to make mistakes that open up vulnerabilities. Take the Target 2013 data breach, for example. Vulnerabilities within the company’s IT administration policies created an opening for hackers to steal more than 20 million user files. That kind of vulnerability is devastating to a company of any size. More than that, the difficulty in regaining customers’s trust is something that you cannot put a price on.
AIOps can automate processes and remove the need for individual users to be involved in IT systems. Therefore, a lower number of overall users needing access across the network reduces the chances of making mistakes that threaten security.
Simply put, you can reduce the number of risks that your IT security team faces by automating processes and limiting user access. Fewer users mean fewer security mistakes that put your entire business IT infrastructure at risk.
Focus staff efforts on important tasks
IT staff members have more responsibilities than ever before, which stretches teams thin and forces teams to focus more on problem management. With AIOps, those same team members can handle a bigger workload with fewer problems thanks to increased productivity and automation.
In terms of productivity, AIOps is a great tool to have since it can perform tasks much faster than people can. Processes that used to take a long time can be done rapidly with the help of AIOps, allowing IT staff to increase their productivity.
Alternatively, AIOps can let your IT team offload tasks that are repetitive, able to be automated, and low priority. Your IT team can establish AIOps tools and processes based on their needs so that each staff member’s workload is focused on important, high-priority, and urgent tasks while minimizing their distractions with low-priority processes.
The Paradigm Shift is Starting, Be Ready
As companies find new ways of deploying AI into their operations, how businesses work will change for the better. For decades, internal teams looked for ways of offloading tasks so that they could focus on what truly matters. AIOps is likely the best chance that businesses have at streamlining internal operations.
For your company, this means a chance at massive improvements through automation and data processing. AIOps represents a versatile set of tools that you can use to revolutionize how your business works.
Don’t wait to start developing AIOps systems and processes. This is especially true for businesses that have digital revenue streams and robust IT systems and staff. This is a chance to get ahead of the market and create a new business advantage at the beginning of a paradigm shift. Begin working now to incorporate AIOps into your daily operations to get the most out of new AI tools.
– Melanie Green
(Contributor)
