As IT infrastructure continues to grow in complexity, companies face a distinct challenge: they must be able to effectively and efficiently manage their infrastructure today, while also preparing it for tomorrow. Having infrastructure that is responsive and adaptable both short-term and long-term is indispensable to keeping users satisfied and maintaining a competitive advantage.
The ability to adapt to continued technological change and increasing business demands starts with IT. Futureproofing IT is best done with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, which can minimize immediate service interruptions while streamlining change management processes. More specifically, AIOps plays a central role in futureproofing, as it enables real-time adaptability while enhancing the scalability and flexibility of IT environments.
Monitoring and Automation, Today and Down the Line
Already, organizations have undergone tremendous change with respect to IT, leading to a complex and often-disparate landscape in which apps, networks, and platforms are deployed across multiple environments: public clouds, private clouds, data centers, etc. Looking forward, complexity is likely to increase even more. That’s why scalable, future-proofed infrastructure must be built on a foundation of advanced monitoring—tools that provide you with the ability to see what’s happening across the entire infrastructure, in a single consolidated view.
Modern monitoring has immediate benefits, such as the ability to proactively identify potential issues before they disrupt business processes. This is crucial, as downtime is expensive. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $56,000 per minute, while the vast majority of organizations (90%) report that a single hour of downtime costs at least six figures.
The ScienceLogic AI Platform was created to mitigate the causes of this downtime. It leverages machine learning and data analytics (Skylar Automated RCA) to not just proactively identify issues, but also to automate decision-making and optimize resource allocation in real-time. Modern monitoring ensures you know what systems exist and how they are function, which also makes onboarding new technologies easier down the line.
Meanwhile, automation in monitoring enables predictive maintenance and, in turn, greater system longevity. At the same time, it frees up IT teams to focus on tasks that cannot be handled by machines, such as big-picture planning and upgrading existing technology. Altogether fusing data from across IT operations improves visibility and performance today, laying the foundation for tomorrow.
Aligning Future Plans with Business Goals
Business service management (BSM), a strategic approach that aligns IT priorities with broader business goals, can also play an important role in future-proofing infrastructure. Increasingly, BSM involves automation, predictive analytics, and AI, among other technologies, to enable end-to-end visibility. Having a long-term, service-centric view across all data centers, clouds, applications, and devices is integral to understanding the impact of IT on the business writ large.
Once strategic alignment between IT and broader business goals are in place, it’s easier and more effective for the organization to plan for the future and analyze the relationship on an ongoing basis. AI can help with everything from optimizing IT spend to enabling continuous learning. In turn, BSM provides a stable foundation that can adapt to changes, whether to technology or the business model itself. Particularly in the wake of greater IT complexity and a faster pace of change, strategic alignment is key to long-term stability.
The Bottom Line
Futureproofing your IT may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be, especially if modern technologies like AI are leveraged properly. The reality is that, for technology, change seems to be the only constant. In the past, many organizations made the mistake of implementing new technologies for the sake of keeping up with trends. Thus, IT teams must make sense of newly complex environments while being prepared to effectively embrace further change down the line.
The Skylar AI suite can help, as it was built to automate monitoring, accelerate innovation, and future-proof IT stacks. To that end, Skylar AI delivers several capabilities, all of which are useful for ensuring smooth changes to operational processes:
Predictive Analytics: AI helps anticipate future disruptions or demands, allowing IT to scale preemptively.
Automation and Autonomy: AI-driven systems can autonomously manage routine tasks and evolve as business requirements change.
Advanced Root Cause Analysis: AI improves the speed and accuracy of identifying the true source of issues, minimizing future risks.
Continuous Learning: AI systems continuously adapt, learning from new data to improve IT operations over time.
The end goal, of course, is Autonomic IT, which is not just automated, but self-healing and self-optimizing. If you’re ready to evaluate your current IT setup, with an eye towards exploring how future-proofing strategies can position you for long-term success, get in touch today.
