An OpsRamp survey published this week suggests large enterprises are looking to finally unify IT management at at time when it is becoming increasingly complex.
OpsRamp, a provider of an IT management platform based on machine learning algorithms, polled 132 IT operations directors working for organizations in the U.S. with more than 500 employees that spend more than $5 million a year on IT.
According to the results, the survey found nearly 73% of respondents plan to roll out a digital operations management platform in 2021. That platform will, hopefully, enable IT teams to unify hybrid cloud computing environments made up of monolithic and microservices-based applications via a single console. Another 21%of respondents expressed interest in such a platform, if budgetary constraints allowed.
More than half (51%) also noted they expect to employ automation and AIOps (51%) in the form of machine learning algorithms and process automation to reliably cut down on the number of alerts being generated, identify the root cause of issues and eliminate repetitive manual tasks.
The two main goals identified in the survey are to enable greater agility and resolve issues faster (46%) and reduce costs by consolidating tools (41%).
While the rise of cloud computing has made IT more agile, each cloud service that is added to the IT firmament tends to increase the total cost of IT. Each IT platform in use today requires a dedicated team to operate, which conspires to increase both the number of tools required and the overall size of the IT staff required to master them.
In the wake of the economic downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of pressure being applied to reduce those costs has increased significantly. Security and compliance concerns are also starting to push organizations toward centralizing the management of IT as much as possible. The OpsRamp survey notes that platform security (59%) is the most critical attribute of a next-generation IT platform, followed by hybrid infrastructure management capabilities (52%) and flexible pricing (37%).
Deepak Jannu, senior director for product marketing at OpsRamp, said achieving those goals across what has become an extended enterprise requires a platform that has the ability to first capture telemetry data in real-time and then aggregate that data in way that enables artificial intelligence (AI) models to learn how the IT environment actually operates.
Armed with that data, it then becomes possible to employ AI to both troubleshoot IT issues more easily and surface recommendations that address capacity utilization, noted Jannu.
It may be a while before AI-enabled IT management platforms are commonplace in the enterprise. However, it’s also apparent a number of factors are driving IT leaders to reevaluate their existing platforms as IT environments become increasingly more complex.
Regardless of what platform an organization eventually opts to standardize on, the rate at which IT management tasks are being automated is only going to increase as machine learning algorithms become more familiar with the IT environment in which they are deployed. That doesn’t necessarily mean those algorithms will remove the need for IT administrators and DevOps teams, however. It does mean that the tasks the individuals on IT teams are focused on will, hopefully, provide a lot more value to the business.