AIOps: The Path to a Better IT Paradigm

AIOps is no mere buzzword. It’s a next-level market that paves the way for modernization by more fully connecting IT health and efficiency with business outcomes. How critical is that connection? Just last year, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram sustained a six-hour downtime due to a router misconfiguration — a relatively simple error that might have been avoided with the help of better system health insights.

The downtime resulted in a decrease of 4.9% in shares, or a $47 billion loss of revenue. So, yeah, pretty critical.

This example is just one cautionary tale that illustrates how IT and business operations can no longer afford to be separate parts of the same ecosystem. They should function more like a single organism, continually in sync to promote the success of your business. Yet, with critical IT infrastructure handling an ever-increasing volume of data and digital activity, the resulting complexity can become overwhelming. To avoid overload, organizations must modernize, and AIOps is essential for that journey forward.

No slowing down, no turning back

Critical business systems are operating in a rapidly evolving digital world. Many business operations begin on hand-held devices, navigate the cloud, and require the services of data centers. Everything is more connected than ever, and digital business activity is expanding. From June 2017 to July 2022, the global average of digital customer interactions tripled. By 2030, the number of IoT-connected devices will also triple, surpassing 29 billion. And there are no signs of it slowing down.

A growing number of IT systems are responsible for supporting this explosion of connected devices and high-speed data volume. And that’s not all that’s growing. The number of alerts and messages generated from these systems and connections is enormous. The input overload can all too easily become indistinguishable background noise, making it difficult for operators to locate the most important problem-solving information buried within. Faced with this kind of data “noise,” humans can find it impossible to work by hand to meet service level agreements (SLAs). These days, to avoid downtime for six hours — or even six minutes — it’s essential to have advanced analysis and automation assistance. That’s why a sophisticated AIOps solution is imperative to address today’s complexity and pave the way for modernization.

A simpler map to follow

A need for acceleration and agility often drives modernization. Businesses want to respond more quickly to customer needs, get a new breed of applications into market, and make better data-informed decisions to improve business outcomes.

To accomplish better outcomes, businesses need improved ways to handle data volume and the necessary infrastructure to support it. Unsurprisingly, they can encounter challenges on multiple fronts. For example, organizations often find that, along with the benefits of agility that hybrid cloud environments provide, can come additional operational complexity.

In addition, organizations need full access to the rich source of data on the mainframe to take advantage of the valuable insights therein. With the rapid pace and expanding sources of activity in today’s digital society, it’s easy to become fragmented and drown in the multitude of system and application noises involved.

In simple terms, AIOps reduces this complexity. When businesses leverage the enhanced performance and automation of AIOps solutions, they can increase the speed and efficiency of the modernization process.

The power behind modernization

AIOps allows you to move from reactive to proactive operations, setting the stage for important modernization initiatives. It offers the following critical advantages:

Anticipation: Identify problems before they happen, analyze historical and real-time data to detect patterns, anticipate incidents quickly, and suggest solutions to recurring issues.

Analysis: Analyze collected information to learn and identify patterns faster than any human can and get to the root causes of problems faster and more efficiently with a decreased mean time to repair (MTTR).

Prioritization: Allocate IT resources according to problem importance, elevating problems of higher priority so they can be solved faster to avoid unplanned downtimes.

Intelligent Automation: Turn insights into automated tasks. AI is a powerful tool for people, not a replacement. Choose which parts of your work to automate, leaving more time for critical tasks.

In addition to these advantages, AIOps can enhance complementary operations. For example, AIOps tools can deliver a holistic incident management solution.

Among tech professionals, AIOps is considered the next “turn of the crank” for IT systems observability — adding analysis to application-generated data so you can measure and predict application status. It uses algorithms to understand observed patterns and indicate how to fix an identified problem. Or better yet, it predicts when problems will occur so you can avoid them. And with data-driven automation, the system doesn’t just show what to do — it does it.

AIOps makes it possible to tie application performance directly to operational results, isolating and resolving errors before they impact customer experiences. There’s an enormous opportunity for businesses to successfully move their observability efforts forward with AIOps solutions.

Make your reality a proactive one

It’s becoming more and more essential to bring all your IT and business resources under a common banner — to maintain critical services, high-value customer experiences, and operational efficiency. And AIOps is an essential link to that new paradigm.

AIOps is the key to creating a proactive reality for your critical systems and operators. By taking a ready stance enabled through AIOps solutions, your business will be better able to navigate inevitable future complexity and stay ahead of the competition.

Learn how Broadcom can help you take the first step in reducing IT complexity with AIOps.