That is an observation of Rich Lane, Forrester senior analyst for infrastructure and operations, following numerous conversations with organizations seeking direction during the pandemic. Lane says that one of the big reasons so many organizations have experienced a precipitous drop-off—or even failure—in network and services performance is because, “We’ve let systems age to the point where we’re in a legacy world from a tooling standpoint,” resulting in visibility problems as companies integrate new technologies while asking more of their systems than they are currently capable of handling.
“When you think about bringing on new technologies and services like containers, Kubernetes, microservices architecture, and things like that, it becomes very difficult as an operations person to measure what the day-in-the-life of a digital user is,” Lane continues. “We need better tooling to do that. We need more intelligent tooling.”
Is the use of legacy ITOM tools catching up with you?
Lane’s insights reflect his experience amplified by the concerns of organizations since work-from-home orders went into effect in February and March. ITOps teams, already straining to keep up with demands on tech resources in a hyper-digital world, are now coming to grips with the fact that years of squeezing just a little bit more service out of legacy ITOM tools has caught up with them. Compounding the issue is the prospect of budget cuts affecting new IT investments. Lane sympathizes with CIOs caught in that dilemma, but cautions against short-term thinking.
Two Cases for Investing in Intelligent IT Operations Monitoring
Two cases come to mind for Lane highlighting the importance of making strategic investments in intelligent IT operations monitoring. The first is a financial institution that recognized how increased demands on its remote banking services could jeopardize customer satisfaction if not addressed. In conversations with the company, they told Lane they’d not delayed, but accelerated their plans for a digital refresh, saying, “We’re actually trying to move faster because we never expected that we’d have these unusual usage patterns for our digital services.”
Today, their two-year roadmap for transformation is being compressed into two months.
The second case Lane cites is a healthcare organization that, in addition to ensuring reliability while responding to the medical needs of its communities amid a global pandemic, must also satisfy the reporting and operational demands of a highly regulated industry. The company approached Lane with their concerns.
“We’re heavily government regulated,” they told him. “We have to hit certain metrics when we onboard customers and people to our healthcare system every step of the way. We have to be able to prove that we’re meeting these metrics that are assigned by the government.”
When informed what is possible by combining the capabilities of AI with IT monitoring and management, they realized they could avoid costly fines for unintended non-compliance penalties, while providing an overall higher level of service to their partners and patients.
How is this possible? With intelligent IT operations monitoring, commonly called AIOps, organizations that rely on their technology infrastructure can apply advanced analytics to drive automated processes and workflows within and across IT. The result? They get better insights for IT operations teams to make better decisions for problem remediation and troubleshooting. That means faster meantime to repair from using those insights to automatically tackle the kind of low complexity, high volume tasks that take up so much of an operations staff’s time every day. And frees up time to streamline and automate more complex processes and workflows that often require multiple people in different organizations performing multiple tasks in tandem.
With the time and hassle of ticketing and routine diagnostics slashed or even eliminated, Lane says companies can start to think about turning the talents of skilled IT staff toward more valuable pursuits. Whether it’s an MSP working to deliver better service or innovative new services for its subscribers, or an organization thinking about how to maintain a higher level of reliability for its employees and customers, Lane says the question becomes, “How can automation specifically help me and my business?”
If you’ve been asking yourself that question, we invite you to register for the webinar, “Transforming From ITOps to AIOps” >>
