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In 2010, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt said, “There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.”
This quote is even more relevant today as the range and complexity of constantly evolving IT infrastructures such as cloud, mobility, and Internet-of-Things generate a morass of structured and unstructured data. This data deluge passes through a company’s IT infrastructure every day posing increasing challenges for IT operations teams. Also, today’s digitally savvy customers demand near real-time service at a time and place convenient to them. Inability to keep pace with these evolving trends can result in disgruntled end-users.
These challenges make it imperative for IT operations teams to change their focus and move from a reactive to a more proactive, creative and customized approach. IT leaders, unfortunately, are not equipped with the budget or manpower necessary to adopt this approach and are forced to cut corners when it comes to handling such issues.
However, many organizations are taking IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) to address these challenges and stay competitive. ITOA enables more innovative and cost-effective methods to carry out business processes and deliver better end-user services.
It provides the following five significant benefits to IT organizations in managing their complex IT infrastructure:
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- Analyze massive amounts of data to identify inconsistencies: By applying big data analytics to IT, ITOA gives organizations the ability to analyze significant amounts of operational data from different applications across an organization’s IT infrastructure in real-time. It also helps identify critical aspects and anomalies that indicate the health and performance of a company’s IT infrastructure. This enables the company to carry out day-to-day operations in a more data-driven style.
- Improves visibility allowing preemptive action:ITOA tools help IT service desks visualize the IT environment with a graphical view of the existing state of the infrastructure and other devices. This enables teams to detect and segregate any disruptions or failures as they occur across an organization’s IT structure. These tools also provide historical information on each device’s activity. With the ability to pinpoint any recent alterations such as installed applications, the operations team can be equipped to predict potential issues that may arise within the IT infrastructure. This makes it easier to prioritize and troubleshoot issues, analyze their impact, and respond with an appropriate strategy to improve performance.
- Facilitates reliable service and intelligent decision-making: ITOA captures critical operational and business insights from data generated by various business processes and services that are part of the company’s IT infrastructure, and compiles them for analysis. This helps IT operations teams gain a clear and comprehensive insight into their organization’s IT infrastructure performance, ensuring reliable service delivery, despite the size or complexity of IT infrastructure. Additionally, ITOA tools also convey an acute understanding of how different issues could impact the broader aspects of the business, and aid teams in optimizing IT and application infrastructure. This results in a competitive advantage for the organization with timely information driving superior decision-making.
- Offers end-user perspective: Many organizations struggle with inefficient back-end monitoring tools that do not detect issues reported by end-users. ITOA tools provide an end-user viewpoint, helping the service team monitor the current state of the IT infrastructure as well as individual devices. This helps them detect specific issues on individual devices within the IT infrastructure, as well as other devices with a comparable configuration, and proactively prevent users from being impacted across the organization.
- Better control over IT investments and workflows: ITOA solutions are scalable and can monitor any number of applications or endpoints within the infrastructure. They do not need to be configured for each of these individually and can be implemented within a limited budget. Contextualizing all transactions and events across varied infrastructure also helps improve productivity across different teams for better workflow efficiency.
Deploying ITOA solutions may require altering an organization’s existing network architecture, but the benefits make it a worthwhile undertaking. Businesses that adopt ITOA can significantly enhance their operations by transforming disconnected data into actionable insights.
In today’s business landscape, data drives decision-making, which ultimately affects both the top line and bottom line of an organization. Strategic use of ITOA solutions can result in measurable improvements, enable leaders to plan better IT budgets, and improve the overall performance of an organization by cutting operations costs and increasing business value.
