Ready or not, digital experiences are now the gateway to customers and the standard-bearer of a company’s brand. Yet, as apps become more distributed, more intelligent and more real-time, they continue to run on infrastructure that resides within on-prem data centers as well as multiple public clouds. This complexity is underscored by gaps across IT teams, leaving businesses, developers and operations teams working in silos without a single source of truth, exposing risks that can inflict not only severe damage to an application’s performance and reliability, but also eventually exposing the entire business.
For IT teams, understanding their applications is key. Not only are they the backbone of any organization, but they also hold invaluable data on customers and their decision-making habits. Having complete visibility is critical in today’s multi-cloud and hybrid cloud world.
When IT teams are able to work quickly and intelligently, they consistently deliver a strong customer experience–avoiding the risk of creating opportunities for customer disengagement and abandonment. Recent research shows that nearly 84% of respondents said they have experienced problems with digital services. As a result, 40% reported switching suppliers due to a poor digital experience and 63% have actively tried to discourage others from using a service or brand if they have a bad digital experience.
What’s the way forward and how can these existing silos be eradicated?
How to Build Better CX
IT teams are faced with a conundrum–they’ve been asked to manage app complexity while simultaneously navigating operational silos that make collaboration, data exchange and problem resolution incredibly challenging. The way forward lies in a collaborative approach across traditionally siloed teams that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to uncover hidden bottlenecks and resolve issues before they can impact the end-user.
Transformational CIOs need their teams–across app and infrastructure owners–to speak a common language rooted in what’s important to the application performance, user experience and the business impact. They need infrastructure decisions in service of the application, which will ultimately drive business performance. They also need application teams to be able to go deeper and quickly identify underlying infrastructure that may be contributing to poor application performance.
In order for true collaboration to take place, the first step is to increase visibility across the IT organization by providing a common view of correlated data across domains that provides contextualized insights to better collaborate and create a superior digital experience.
For application teams, this means gaining insight into the users’ most transited application journeys, helping to clearly identify application bottlenecks and abandonment and to triage efficiently. For the infrastructure teams, improved visibility means having insight into infrastructure constraints impacting app performance so that teams can correlate the user experience to any underlying infrastructure in real-time. Through this increased visibility and context, application and infrastructure teams can clearly identify respective action items and move swiftly to resolve the right issues, at exactly the right time.
This notion of fill stack visibility and correlated insights that drive action is a mindset commonly referred to as AIOps.
Enter AIOps
While it may be true that the emergence of today’s modern application and infrastructure environments has provided the speed and flexibility professionals demand, the numerous services have unleashed a deluge of data on the enterprise IT environment. Automating tasks has helped teams to free up some bandwidth for operations and planning, yet automation alone is no match for today’s increasingly complex environments. What’s needed is a strategy focused on reducing the burden of mounting IT operations responsibilities, and surfacing the insights that matter most so that businesses can take the right action.
So, what are forward-thinking IT professionals doing to stay ahead of the curve?
Many are applying an AIOps approach to the challenge of environment complexities. AIOps leverages advances in machine learning and AI to proactively resolve problems that arise in the application and infrastructure environment. This is so powerful because using AI to identify potential challenges doesn’t just help IT professionals get ahead of problems, it helps companies avoid revenue-impacting outages that jeopardize the customer experience, the business and the brand. What’s more, an AIOps strategy can provide:
- Intelligent alerting that can be trusted to indicate an emerging issue. By ingesting data, AIOps platforms and technology can play a pivotal role in not just automating existing IT tasks, but identifying and managing new ones based on potential problems detected.
- Automated root cause analysis and business impact assessment. With the help of AIOps technology, this can be achieved, providing increased agility in the face of potential service disruptions or threats, and without additional drain on resources.
- Automated remediation for common issues. With an AIOps platform, it’s easy to not only automate remediation for known issues, but unknown issues, too. That’s because it can ingest data and also provide more intelligent insights as a result of it.
The path forward is clear. Digital businesses are not only the future but they are today’s norm. Any IT leader looking to succeed needs to rethink their overall approach and embrace a future that includes complete visibility of their technology and application stack, and also a strategic approach that keeps their teams operating one step ahead of the curve.
