The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown has become a challenge to businesses and economies of the world. As the virus spreads among the community, the safety of the people has become the top priority of the business.
IT Operations Management is always on its toes continuously working round the clock more than ever to ensure the availability of systems for business users.
On a normal day, IT Operations works are in a planned manner which enables the CTO/Operations Manager to foresee the workload to optimise workforce accordingly. In most cases, CXOs do not realise that IT Operations is not easy in a complex hybrid IT environments, especially when it comes to supporting various business functions – internal es within and external to the organisation – with different working styles or culture. But in times of crisis, like COVID-19 pandemic, the CXO’s are more focused on the agility of core IT Operations looking for innovative solutions in achieving this goal.
With constraint on spending, two main initiatives have gained importance in order to meet the Agility framework of the IT Operations.
- Smart Process Automation
- Analytics
Today, automation in most organisations are available in silos with multiple solutions deployed to cater to a different set of problems. Hence the need of the hour is a simplified platform to cater to all the process automation needs of the Business, Users and IT Operations. To address this, Smart Process Automation and Chatbots are becoming a key ingredient of the building block.
Chatbots bring a user-friendly interface, where the user can type their requirement in a natural language,which in turn will invoke Process Automation.
Process Automation with advanced integration frameworks can connect either directly to the IT systems like Server, Network, Business Applications, etc.,or can connect to other IT Operations tools like ITSM, ITOM, ITAM to fulfill various services requirements like:
- HR Services
- Facility Management
- OS Provisioning
- IT Request
- Incident Management
- Knowledge Article
- Visitor Gate Pass Management
- Leave Management
- Transporter Management
and more……..
Process Automation has become a saviour for the IT Operations Management Team allowing them to record repetitive tasks of Business & IT Users directly into tools without the need to know complex coding. This in turn is executed via Chatbots, hence eliminating the lengthy process of calling the Help Desk, registering a request, approval & manual error.
Analytics in IT Operations Management
Analytics always has been associated with the business for analysis of data and in particular for decision making.However, it has found its way into the IT Operations and will soon become a norm.
Analytics brings a dynamic way of thinking & taking agility into the next level of IT operations, i.e. from being ‘proactive’ to ‘predictive’ in nature. Powered by advanced pattern matching capabilities of Big Data engines coupled with Artificial Intelligence, analytics can analyse Terabytes of data from the infrastructure environment to predict Data center insights. Here are some of the key challenges addressed for seamless operations:
- Capacity Management: Capacity Management (Server Resource, Storage, User Load, Bandwidth, etc) is the biggest challenge for the data centre. In most cases IT ends up procuring DC equipment based on static reporting structure, hence several ideal or unused units go unnoticed.
Analytics can give a deeper, time-relevant insights, empowering decision-makers to plan or rearrange the capacity within the DC.
- Incident Heat Map:Traditionally, incidents are either from end-users (reactive) or from event management (proactive) which are configured to detect fixed configured threshold. Both these approaches cause delayed reactions from IT Operations team leading to major outages with revenue loss to the business.
Analytics plays a major role here too, where it can analyze data from several sources. The most important aspect here is to collect data directly from systems, thus eliminating the need for threshold-based event configurations. These become the key to understand the anomalies & also helps unique base lining of each system.
Analytics with the required decision-making data help provide information weeks or months in advance, many of which can be auto fixed with the Smart Process Automation without human intervention. This helps in saving time for the Operations Team for better utilisation in other innovative tasks for the organisation during the tough COVID times.
You can get a head start into analytics powered IT Operations Management to help your business sail through COVID smoothly. Consult with us today!
