In this blog post
Analytics is a powerful enabler of business decisions and operations.
The roots were grounded when monitoring required a closer look. However, analytics is purely forecasting future based on the past events. To quote a simple example: It’s driving with an eye on the rear-view mirror.
The application of analytics to operational decisions is prevalent across industries. Some common use cases include predicting returns of financial portfolio returns based on historical trends, reduction of costs by energy companies based on anomaly patterns, traffic planning and regulation algorithms based on analytics.
Over the recent years, the potential of analytics is vigorously explored in enterprises, particularly in the space of IT operations, leading to significant delivery benefits. Here are four reasons why enterprises cannot afford to ignore ITOA in today’s highly digital and competitive age:
Reactive to Proactive – A transition: Production outages pressure the system administrators, and the help-desk team goes on a toss. The solutions are limited as temporary solutions to get the system working gained focus. A root-cause check or a solution to avoid any future outages were not planned. Proactive detection of patterns monitors the efficiency and improves the system availability.
What does analytics do? It monitors the system and, alerts the team when a potential threat, which quantifies the future. It helps to avoid any outages in future controlling the expenditure on outages.
Example: If the memory usage shoots at 95% and the application is likely to crash the system will alert the user instantly to avoid an outage. The prescriptive system is self-contained and self-healing.
Transform service delivery: ITOA benefits the end consumer with transparency and accurate service delivery, irrespective of whether the end-user is a developer reliant on system resources or a business user whose profits are proportional to system uptime.
Predictive analytics has provided the right impetus required by accurately predicting SLAs based on past indicators and attributes (owner of the service ticket, nature of the issue, the system where the problem occurred, etc.). These SLAs are then communicated to the end-user, providing much-needed visibility. It also provides the technicians a benchmark. For instance, GAVS uses a web-based dashboard to relay service level information to users 24*7.
Enhance capacity planning: Capacity planning is a primary focus for infrastructure managers. In the age of virtualization and scalability, the capability to operate dynamically is not a bonus, but mandatory. For e.g. if you spawn more virtual servers than needed, utilization of resources is not going to be efficient or cost-effective. Conversely, if you spawn less than needed, you run the risk of overload and corresponding outage.
Analytics computes the utilization over a period to arrive at the best formula or strategy to deploy resources. Additionally, ITOA makes it a seamless transition when enterprises try to scale in terms of volume and data.
Enable BYOD integration: The concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) at work has increased the access points that need to be managed for security and sustainability. ITOA is imperative in this scenario to offer flexibility, security and to tap into the potential of IoT. According to a Gartner study, 40% of the workforce will be mobile by 2016, which necessitates that enterprises be prepared to handle non-traditional connectivity, models. ITOA offers high-end network solutions that are feasible to implement in such a complex environment.
ITOA is the transformation from enterprises’ operational centers to Centers of Excellence (CoEs). It has played a pivotal role in propelling IT’s role from being perceived as a cost center to that of an enabler and has resulted in the direct translation of technology into business intelligence. Organizations are agiler with the capability to adapt to an era that seeks mobility, scalability and are sophisticated than ever before.
A personal introduction during a business meeting or the reading of a speaker’s bio is a typical way to get to know someone in our business life. It’s fun to visualize the illustrious journey of our colleagues, leaders in companies, and famous guides and visionaries as we listen to their introductions and Bios.
It was an unguarded moment for my church-going, straight-laced handyman & landscaper, “ I am not sure if I am ready to trust a woman leader”, and finally the loss of first woman Presidential candidate in the US, that led me to ruminate about Women and Leadership and indulge in my most “ time suck” activities, google and peruse through Wikipedia.
Oil prices were in for a shock on a mid-September Monday morning, when two of Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities were attacked by multiple drones. Around 5% of the world’s oil supply was hit and it took the US’ reserves opening news to calm the oil price jump.