Daunting. It’s one of the first words that comes to mind for IT and business leaders tackling the challenges of 2023 and looking to future-proof their organizations.
IT operations (ITOps) departments are working to balance priorities during a time of growing uncertainty and pressure. ITOps is the team that keeps the lights on, and today, it must do so with enough speed to meet business demands. Seventy-two percent will remain loyal to companies in 2023 if they provide faster service, according to Forbes.
Organizations are about as frugal as it gets right now, as they ride out economic instability and concerns of a possible recession. Knowing what the economy will look like tomorrow can seem downright impossible, which is unsettling for any business leader. The drop in spending really turns up the heat in ITOps, as they’re expected to do much more with much less.
Now’s the time to optimize everything — when goals seem out of reach — to conquer overwhelming pain points and set the business up to thrive. Below, we list the top pain points in ITOps right now, and explain how addressing each one specifically impacts business outcomes.
1. Service disruptions: Alerts, events, and outages
Unplanned events are bound to happen, but it’s important for IT teams to minimize service disruptions as they hit businesses hard. Downtime is among the biggest threats to businesses because of the severe financial hit that comes with it.
Take Singapore-based bank DBS Group, for example. In March 2023, Southeast Asia’s largest bank experienced a 10-hour outage of its digital services that caused its stock to lose 1.4 percent of its value in just one day, CNBC reported. IT incidents bruise the customer experience, and hit the business’s bottom line hard, posing damage to business agility and future operations.
Organizations simply cannot afford money lost due to downtime during outages and unexpected events, so they have to get in front of problems and try to minimize them. Proactive, automatic incident response via web application management is critical for more than just the IT department – its benefits reach the organization as a whole. Automated incident response and remediation brings notable benefits to the business, like improved mean time to resolution. In many cases, end-to-end automation can take average MTTR from about 60 minutes to less than five.
Further, automation handles the time-consuming triage and validation of alerts, including running comprehensive diagnosis across diverse IT environments. Automation reduces false positives, enabling ITOps to dedicate time to understand how the problems started. And because IT staff is freed up to focus on problem-solving and digging down into the root cause of incidents, they can focus on preventing future incidents from occurring.
Resolution time becomes 99 percent faster
C&W Networks is a voice, messaging, and data service provider for 83.1 million customers in 42 countries. Needing to improve in several areas, like customer experience, MTTR, reducing escalations and more, the global giant used automation and integrated it with their existing platforms for immediate relief and noticeable changes.
They improved MTTR from six minutes to four seconds with automated troubleshooting processes, decision-tree support, software tools and CSR scription to guide customer engagements. C&W Networks also used automation for incident validation and diagnosis, empowering L1 engineers to solve complex problems on their own, and streamlining operations like ticket creation and even enrichment. They reached an astonishing 99 percent faster resolution time.
Automations that speed up resolution include low-disk space remediation, link down issues, services stops, and web application down remediation.
2. Infrastructure and operations service requests
The relationship between IT teams, as well as IT and the business is evolving. ITOps teams are the glue that holds IT and the business together, by managing the applications, processes, and platforms that support IT. Today, new business pressures force IT into adapting new practices and technologies, and it’s no small transformation.
For just one example, IT infrastructure is moving from a solely on-premises data center to virtual environments via cloud. They’re switching IT focus back-and-forth between cloud-based and on-premises environments, while maintaining data security at the same time. We know data is exploding and has earned a top spot for organizational decision-making and sound operations. Servers and cloud computing enable the data to flow, transitioning infrastructure to a critical need for business operations.
As with all of IT, ITOps provides support to organizations, helping them achieve business objectives. Being able to left-shift some service requests can mean a world of difference, but too often, the reality of left-shift can mean accessing mission-critical systems and production servers.
IT process automation helps swiftly and reliably provision servers upon service requests, which can be done with an automation workflow, minus the need to expose critical logins and credentials. In fact, automated infrastructure and operations service requests are highly ideal use cases in which application monitoring and creation of alerts is performed automatically, saving time and efficiency to positively impact the business.
Response time improves by 90 percent
A multi-national financial services company recently overcame big challenges with automation. It was supporting a very complex, giant IT environment that included 60,000 servers, 10,000 database instances, 72 BP Storage, 21,000 middleware instances, and nearly 500 applications. The incidents and service requests were completely out of hand, and so were the operating costs.
The company automated numerous IT tasks in one unified platform, and expansive third-party integration enabled interoperability across solutions and systems running throughout the enterprise. The results? Automation handed the company a 90 percent improvement in response time, an 85 percent improvement in turnaround time, and a 40 percent productivity boost with improved MTTR.
Automations that boost response time includes VM provisioning and de-provisioning, application provisioning, self-service resource provisioning, and employee onboarding and offboarding requests.
ITOps has a lot of big jobs to do, and leaders know automation is a must for enablement, empowerment, and positively impacting the business as a whole. With automation, companies make the most of valuable time, save millions of dollars, keep employees and customers happy, and more. Reach out to Resolve to learn how your organization can benefit from automation for ITOps.
