In today’s digital-first landscape, where IT underpins almost every aspect of business operations, efficiency in IT isn’t just a bonus; it’s foundational for reducing operational costs, improving performance, mitigating risk, driving innovation, and staying competitive.
Core areas to focus on when driving operations efficiency include infrastructure management, business service management, security, and monitoring.
While the industry paradigm shift to AIOps brought new ways to optimize these workflows, key challenges remain when it comes to leveraging automation to maximize efficiency.
Barriers to Achieving IT Operations Efficiency
Despite advances in infrastructure management, business service management, security, and monitoring technologies, tools, and processes, achieving efficiency in IT operations is challenging.
Common bottlenecks include manual processes, outdated, sprawled and siloed tools, and reactive strategies.
For example, IT teams are often divided by specialization (e.g., network, storage, applications), leading to fragmented processes and data swamps. This fragmentation makes it challenging to obtain a unified view of the IT landscape and overall system health. According to our recent industry research with Vanson Bourne, 50% of organizations use multiple, disparate tools to monitor resources.
This delays incident response, makes it hard to identify the root causes of incidents, and leads to inefficient resource allocation as teams work in isolation, reactively troubleshooting issues within their domains. Meanwhile, customers grow dissatisfied with their digital experiences.
Tackling daily challenges is only part of the struggle. Inefficient IT operations also impede the development of future-ready infrastructures that can support innovations like generative AI. As IT environments grow more complex and data volumes expand beyond human capacity, there’s an urgent need to complete the transition to AIOps and shift towards highly automated infrastructures. These intelligent systems enhance visibility, streamline issue detection, and speed up resolution times, helping organizations keep pace with emerging demands.
But when IT is siloed, it creates a chaotic environment that undermines operations. The study found that nearly 40% of respondents cite the inability to monitor all IT resources as a barrier to AIOps adoption. Alarmingly, nearly all organizations surveyed (98%) face barriers when it comes to integrating observability software – a critical step for achieving a unified view of on-premises, cloud, and edge resources, automating diagnostics and complex repair workflows, and progressing on the journey to Autonomic IT.
Leveraging Automation and AI Tools for IT Operations Efficiency
Switching to a unified platform like the ScienceLogic AI Platform with support from the Skylar AI suite helps organizations address these challenges head-on, significantly improving IT operations efficiency.
The ScienceLogic AI Platform consolidates data across the IT environment into a contextualized data lake, cutting through tool sprawl to provide a holistic view, enhance analysis, and enable coordinated decision-making. By unifying tools and teams, it improves both staff productivity and overall operational efficiency. It also supports the shift from Siloed to Coordinated IT, enabling enterprises to take the first step in their journeys to Autonomic IT.
This data-aware approach helps engineers find issues faster, if not predict them before they occur. Skylar Automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA), powered by the ScienceLogic AI Platform, eliminates the manual effort traditionally required to diagnose root causes. Using generative AI, Skylar summarizes issues and provides remediation recommendations, making it easier to adopt automation while freeing IT teams to focus on more innovative, high-impact work.
And because Skylar AI maps IT assets to business services, it helps IT teams understand the impact of any infrastructure issue on specific business functions. This prioritization ensures that IT resources are focused on resolving the most business-critical issues first, maximizing operational impact.
Automation within the ScienceLogic AI Platform also plays a crucial role in maintaining uninterrupted service delivery as new IT assets are added. ScienceLogic automatically discovers new assets, maps dependencies, keeps an accurate inventory, and monitors configuration changes in real-time. Drawing from Skylar Advisor’s guidance, ScienceLogic can even help enterprises implement self-healing automation; if a configuration setting fails or changes, Skylar AI restores the system to its intended state without manual intervention.
Cost efficiency is another key benefit. Skylar Automated Rot Cause Analysis lowers the operational costs associated with service management by automating routine tasks while Skylar Analytics and Skylar Advisor help optimize resource utilization, enabling organizations to manage more services with fewer resources – an essential advantage for scaling sustainably.
Measuring Success
Measuring IT operations efficiency is crucial to ensuring that investments in AI and automation support business goals. And there’s no shortage of key performance indicators to keep tabs on the performance, productivity, and cost-effectiveness of IT functions.
Our tools for real-time monitoring and reporting help organizations utilize real-time reporting, continuous IT monitoring, and detection capabilities to optimize efficiency and make data-driven decisions. For example, Skylar Analytics transforms data insights and KPIs into impactful visualizations for a unified view of the IT infrastructure and informed decision-making.
Moreover, ScienceLogic regularly adds new metrics to its monitoring capabilities to ensure customers never miss a beat, including availability and reliability metrics and cloud performance metrics.
With all of these metrics being tracked, Skylar Advisor can proactively recommend even more ways to optimize to ensure IT operations and the business are always performing at peak performance.
The Bottom Line
Automation and AI tools are key to IT efficiency and productivity and can help you overcome common challenges to IT operations efficiency, complete the transition to AIOps and progress on your journey to Autonomic IT.
And yet, challenges will always persist given the nature of technological evolution. That’s why it can be helpful to work with a trusted partner like ScienceLogic to help you along this important journey. Our platform is simplified, efficient, and proven. With Autonomic IT, you can improve uptime and performance, streamline operations processes, and drive continuous improvement.
Learn more about the Autonomic IT journey or contact our Advisory Services to help you determine where you are on your maturity journey.