Executives with Appetites: Feasting on Automated Incident Response

“We’re continuing to let humans do human things while allowing machines to do machine things.” – Mark Henninger, Director of Network Operations, Windstream

The comment above by Resolve Systems’ Executive Dinner Speaker was the sentiment of the evening Thursday, June 15, 2017, at Rathbun’s, in Atlanta. Top of mind for executives from Security Ops, Network Ops, IT Ops and Service Desk teams? What enterprise incident resolutions actions constitute “machine things.”

The discussion was deep, engaging, and as bold as the flavors coming out of local executive Chef Kevin Rathbun’s namesake Southern Steakhouse kitchen. Industry leaders expressed overlapping directives within their respective enterprises:

• Shifting business momentum toward digital transformation, of which automation will be a huge part
• Establishing automated incident resolution for the first 10-steps or so, to set frontline agents up for success
• A company-wide focus on instilling automated incident response facing enterprise customers first
• Implementing automated incident response for security
• Procuring an enterprise-wide platform with a company that will take the time to understand their organization’s’ vision—from the bottom up—and one that has the capacity to integrate applications and systems through a “single dashboard”

ROI Resurgens!

– Say Executives in Atlanta, on Effective Incident Resolution

Chris Brown, Civil Engineer with NCR Corporation, summed up a common consensus shared in the full dining room. “Smart people are burning [expensive] hours on simple tasks.” Others agreed too many people were watching alarms they can’t actually do anything with and the “sea of red” was chock-full of alarms crying wolf. The attendees agreed “machine things,” worth automating include:

• Simple, repetitive tasks
• Deciphering false alarms from legitimate incidents
• Recommending specific actions for common incidents, using human-guided automation; drawing from engineers’ subject matter expertise
• Reducing response times
• Weeding out the noise
• Process documentation

Henninger candidly elaborated on automation opportunities his company, Windstream, leveraged with Resolve. He illustrated Resolve’s value in the timeliness of delivery, coming in under budget and exceeding expectations. The extensive Q&A session naturally trailed into next steps with automation potential for Windstream, now that the initial project is coming to a conclusion and C-suite management is delightfully wowed by the significant impact Resolve has had.

To see a full report on how the Resolve Platform integrates within existing applications for enterprise-wide incident response, see Forrester’s recently published analysis. To learn of Resolve Systems’ upcoming events, click here.