Throughout my career, the expectation for IT has been to support the business as a secondary function of other departments. Now the pendulum has shifted, and IT teams have taken centre stage as applications and other digital tools have become the method of choice for customers to engage with brands. And as we’ve seen in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, technologists and IT decision-makers are faced with a heavy burden that only they can bear: Meeting the ever-changing needs of volatile markets.
As digital transformation initiatives continue to accelerate in virtually every industry across the globe, businesses are relying on the innovation and performance of digital services to remain competitive. Artificial intelligence for IT operations, or AIOps, is one of the most promising solutions for organizations looking to reduce the complexity of managing these services. AIOps refers to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to ingest and analyze large volumes of data from every corner of the IT environment, bringing data silos together with the means to filter them, detecting patterns, and clustering meaningful information for more efficient actioning.
Aligning collaboration among all IT domains as well as senior leaders who rely on critical data to make key business decisions is a major benefit of this technology. Plus, when made part of a full-stack observability platform, capabilities for increased visibility and seamlessly ingested data from multiple sources also become available. And that’s just scratching the surface of what these platforms can do.
The AIOps platform market is projected to grow by $18 billion by 2027, according to a recent report from MIT Technology Review. This year, AIOps will evolve to allow IT teams to manage performance challenges in real-time. And soon these platforms will provide IT with predictive insights to prevent issues before they happen. This enormous potential for self-healing and operational efficiency means AIOps will continue to gain momentum this year.
Here are some of the ways AIOps will transform enterprise IT throughout 2021.
Mitigating the talent gap in IT
Much of traditional IT operations work is centred around manually producing and maintaining reliable environments for the delivery of applications and other digital services. With the integration of an AIOps platform, IT benefits from faster resolutions to outages and other problems, and in the process, decreases mean time to repair (MTTR) and costs associated with performance challenges. This reduces the need for these traditional tasks to be directly managed by IT personnel. Enabling IT teams to free up time from performing routine tasks to focus on innovation.
With AIOps, IT teams can do more with less. Of course, those who oversee the performance of AIOps platforms will need some upskilling to manage the platform. But the same vendors that provide AIOps solutions often supply the necessary onboarding to make the integration as seamless as possible for the business.
Creating powerful synergies through DevOps integration
DevOps has introduced faster release cycles than ever before. The adoption of cloud providers has enabled the adoption of microservices, each with its own set of monitoring tools. By producing terabytes of disparate data IT teams cannot make sense of, these innovative practices help as much as they hinder.
Issues in data often go undetected or take too long to resolve. This drives up MTTR, risking compliance and customer trust, and reducing the ability to innovate. The solutions are available in the underlying data, waiting to be found, but IT teams need more support to make these connections. The implementation of AIOps is a great way to solve this, and enterprise IT will soon see elements of AIOps and DevOps blending as companies build in full-stack observability to their continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) cycle.
Levelling the playing field with strengthened cybersecurity
According to a survey from PwC, the rise of online activity due to COVID-19 made cyberattacks the leading threat to the growth potential of organizations in North America last year. Though cyber threats continue to become more complex in nature, the countermeasures to secure enterprises from attacks are constantly evolving as well. This is a boon for IT decision-makers looking for ways to manage threats proactively. They will benefit from tighter collaboration between application teams and security teams as the demand for faster iterations of application code means security will need to follow these changes closely.
Organizations do need to use every tool they can to mitigate the damage of cyberattacks, or even better – prevent them entirely. IT teams will turn to AIOps solutions in larger numbers to strengthen defences and protect the business from new and sophisticated cyber threats. Faced with these IT security challenges, AIOps can help organizations detect, assess, and eliminate potential security vulnerabilities before they are exploited by bad actors.
For these reasons and more, AIOps is set to transform enterprise IT this year. The technology is mature, so business leaders and IT professionals should take advantage of its benefits. And with the pressing nature of modern IT challenges, including new vulnerabilities brought about by the ongoing trend of remote work, the benefits of embarking on the journey to AIOps far outweigh the costs of integrating with the platform.
