AIOps is the way of the future – are you ready?

By Bob Lamendola, Senior Vice President, Technology and Head of Digital Services Center, Ricoh USA, Inc.

Summary

Simplify complexities and more effectively manage more information with AIOps.

Read time: 2 minutes

As the majority of the workforce has dispersed, devising solutions for fluid communication and collaboration, as well as data management, is now a top priority for many companies.To keep employees actively engaged and productive, making data available from any location is key.

Future business success will rely on identifying the right data points and using that data to make faster, more informed decisions. AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) prompts faster, more impactful decision-making. In a business climate centered on acceleration, tapping into AIOps will deliver benefits to your organization’s pathway to the future.

Business leaders today face a challenging reality. They are expected to make faster decisions based on massive amounts of data. This data can include customer information, employee information, financial data and much more.

Yet, this expectation presents a major challenge. The data is not always structured the same way, or structured at all (what is referred to as unstructured data - information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner).

Unstructured data like this challenges organizations to analyze all of the data through one lens, which may be the fast way to get to a decision, but it certainly won’t always prove the most effective.

AIOps makes information management more effective

AIOps leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify an IT problem through tools such as Machine Learning (ML), big data and analytics.

Continually managing and analyzing information to make more effective business decisions faster will require the integration of AIOps.

With AIOps, businesses can leverage machine learning (ML) and process learnings to:

Help drive directions and decisions,
Gather and comprehend massive amounts of data,
Uncover causes of disruption,
Identify systematic patterns that could impact performance.

Ultimately these approaches can be applied to various operational efficiency strategies to help simplify complexities and find hidden opportunities.

Think of it like a massive funnel. You can input an enormous amount of data and quickly you get an analysis report that is easy to comprehend and clearly presents option for actions.

Strike a balance of productivity and efficiency with AIOps

AIOps can be an effective tool for application upgrades – a process that is never a straight line for CIOs. Particularly in enterprises with large employee populations, there is often equal demand for continuity with existing applications and the implementation of new ones.

While this requires double the work for an IT department, the same quality of experience (QoE) is expected for both old and new. The automation that can result from using AIOps can help streamline these overall process.

AIOps helps strike the balance between productivity and efficiency because it sees no constraints. Whether data is structured or unstructured – it is analyzed and monitored the same way. A task that without automation could take hours or even days, can now take minutes, and deliver more actionable, digestible insights.

Gartner predicts that large enterprise use of AIOps to monitor applications and infrastructure will rise from 5% in 2018 to 30% in 2023.

Where in an organization does AIOps deliver the most impact?

Those organizations looking to optimize cloud operations and security should be exploring AIOps for the business-critical efficiencies it delivers. IDC estimates that the adoption of AIOps in IT is going to increase significantly as more tools - such as those used for asset and change management - include intelligence to help manage the complexities introduced by continuous change, digital transformation, and distributed cloud services. It may require IT investment to get the right tools and expertise in place, but the longer-term return on investment (ROI) will prove well worth it.

How? Let’s take a look at the growing need for advanced threat intelligence analysis as one example of how.

With so many businesses employing remote workers and hybrid workers, the digital workplace has evolved and will continue to evolve outside of office walls. This opens up the potential opportunity for more threat actors to find their way onto a network.

In order to prevent such attacks, actionable and accurate intelligence is required about the threat itself. And in the case of any potential breach, the faster the better.

Threat intelligence can provide behavioral information based on the account, an assessment of a compromise, insights into the attack’s source and much more – all of which is crucial information to help prevent or stop an attack.

Now, think of how AIOps can improve the response time for such a threat:

AIOps quickly and accurately analyzes both structured and unstructured data.
It can uncover patterns across various data sets that can help analysts to explore a more targeted next steps- versus a longer list of possibilities.
ML capabilities enable aggregation at a much larger scale, which means more endpoints, information and so on can be analyzed more rapidly.

With AIOps, security teams could have the information and analysis they need to assess or even prevent an attack in a matter of minutes. And when it comes to threats, time could very literally be money.

Other examples of ways AIOps can be beneficial include fraud detection, data classification monitoring, endpoint and network behavior monitoring among others.

Does AIOps make sense for your business?

Gartner predicts that large enterprise use of AIOps to monitor applications and infrastructure will rise from 5% in 2018 to 30% in 2023. Tapping into the power of AIOps, it’s automation capabilities and abilities to oversee process automation will help your organization drive more effective and timely business decisions. Ask yourself these questions to determine if AIOps is right for you:

Am I confident I’m looking at all of the right data?
Is my data easily managed? If not, what are my barriers?
Does my team have the tools and resources needed to make the most effective business decisions?

The time is right to explore the possibilities.

Consider AIOPs

Use AOIps to make more impactful business decisions

Bob Lamendola is responsible for creating a clear strategy and identity for Ricoh’s Digital Services portfolio, unifying Service development and innovation to enable efficiency and agility, and aligning and prioritizing resources with a customer centric focus.

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