Get ready: The flood is coming, a flood of data like we’ve never seen before. 

What’s causing this data deluge? Well, many factors as Gartner noted in 2019: “IT operations is challenged by the rapid growth in data volumes generated by IT infrastructure and applications that must be captured, analyzed and acted on.” 

We’re drowning under a flood of alerts, incidents, and noise, along with repetitive tasks crying out to be automated.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hand it all over to AI? It’s already happening. IDC has predicted that 60% of enterprise IT organizations will begin implementing “artificial intelligence to augment, streamline, and accelerate IT operations” by 2022.

When adding AI to the next iteration of IT, the result is AIOps. And far from being science fiction, AIOps can not only future-proof your IT, it can strengthen your IT team today with better decision making, business insights, and operations. Let’s take a look at how to do that, including three essential tips to prepare for your organization’s AIOps future.

What Is AIOps?

According to Gartner, who coined the term back in 2016, “AIOps is the application of machine learning (ML) and data science to IT operations problems.”

The use cases are endless: event correlation and analysis, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, natural language processing, and more.

Take monitoring, for example. Gartner reports that AIOps platforms can be a “force multiplier for monitoring tools,” bringing together diverse information from multiple platforms, including application performance monitoring (APM) and IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM), digital experience monitoring, network performance monitoring, and other diagnostic tools. 

Ultimately, this will change the way we do things, for the better. AIOps goes where your team can’t, saving you work over the long run.

Tighter Security, Financial Gains

One of the truisms in IT is that security tasks are among the most crucial and the most repetitive–and costly. 

Threat detection and data security consume vast and growing amounts of IT time and budget. One expert with IDC has stated that security should represent between 7% and 10% of the IT budget, yet almost a quarter of organizations today spend 20% of their IT budget on security (CIO).

Security is probably the best use case for AIOps, especially given that its greatest strength is using ML and AI to correlate seemingly unrelated factors. 

For example, biometric logins provide tighter security, but they can be a hassle to implement, requiring the ability to handle and analyze bigger data. The AI and machine learning capabilities of AIOps can easily handle this new information stream and even potentially expand to other ways of recognizing authorized users.

Dynamic authentication algorithms are another way to tighten security on the fly. User Jane Smith may have a high-access level when she’s on-site, but if she suddenly logs in from Australia when she lives in Minnesota, it might be smart to decrease her access level until she’s been verified some other way. AIOps can intelligently observe and learn a user’s patterns and thus identify atypical security behavior–and act on this data immediately.

A final example is the situation of remediating security vulnerabilities. With intelligent impact analysis, AIOps can weigh the risks and benefits of patching a vulnerability immediately or postponing the patch. Currently, vulnerability management software uses basic statistical analysis, centered around questions like “How many times was this vulnerability exploited in the last week?” In many cases, that analysis isn’t good enough. AIOps lets users weigh risks and benefits, with continuous insights across IT operations management.

When it comes to security, AIOps is the best of both worlds–lowering security spend with strategic automation and intelligence while generating smart metrics to justify expenses. So how can you get it working for you?

Top Tips for AIOps Success

While the AIOps future will soon be here, it’s best to approach with caution. Here are three best practices to help your organization ease the transition:

1. Know Your Goals

When choosing which AIOps tools to embrace first, choose goals related to costly and redundant business processes and that promise clear targets for maximum c-suite enthusiasm.  Look for ways to either save costs or monetize–especially when it comes to customer retention or satisfaction.

And at the other end, look for buy-in from your IT team. It helps to know your team’s pain points to better choose which problems to address strategically. You might want to focus on DevOps processes that are not yet working optimally.

2. Prepare the Field

We’ve all heard the expression: Garbage In, Garbage Out. AIOps tools work best with the most accurate data. So get a good handle on your environment before you transition to AIOps tools, if possible.

Obviously, if your environment was running perfectly, you wouldn’t need AIOps. But you can lay the groundwork by ensuring that your systems are up-to-date. Verify that your security tools, like monitoring tools, are working correctly. And check in with your team, brainstorming opportunities and data flows to maximize AIOps.

3. Start Simple & Grow, Grow, Grow

AIOps is still evolving. There may not be off-the-shelf solutions for all of your pain points right now. You also probably won’t have team members skilled enough to jump right in. 

So, it often makes more sense not to dive all the way in at first. Instead, pilot AIOps with a single use case to help your organization begin the journey. Capture knowledge from this and extrapolate it to other use cases as you grow.

You can also use this transition period to train existing staff, thus saving on new hires. Plus, solutions that currently exist may require customization, making early adoption prohibitively expensive. So you’ll also save money as you await product and market maturity.

The Benefits of AIOps – Here and Now

While the promise of AIOps is extremely exciting (watch this blog for updates!), you don’t have to wait–you can still get some of the benefits today.

In many cases, you can obtain AIOps-like functionality with existing tools. 

Looking at security, for example, today’s top vulnerability remediation tools offer you advanced intelligence and automation in an affordable, off-the-shelf product. JetPatch is one tool that provides intelligent vulnerability remediation to keep your entire patching environment running smoothly while giving you insights into the status of all endpoints on your network.

AIOps is more than just a specific set of tools: It’s a philosophy of saving you time and getting the most out of the data you already have. 

So why wait? Intelligent tools like JetPatch let you embrace this philosophy today. 

The future of IT is already here. To find out how JetPatch can integrate your entire environment, keep your organization secure, and save your team work through automation and intelligence. Click HERE to pick your best time for a call.