What is AIOps?

Asking what AIOps is might sound like a straightforward question, but it's not so simple to answer. The concept is still being shaped by innovation, but it now encompasses elements like machine learning (ML), predictive insights, automated root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and performance baselining.

If you're interested in learning more about what AiOps is and how it could potentially help your IT team move your business forward, here's what you should know. 

What is AIOps?

Gartner coined the term AIOps in 2017 and it stands for "artificial intelligence for IT operations." With the increasing use of technology in business, what AIOps is striving to do is enhance the IT environment by marrying artificial intelligence (AI) with big data.

The impact of AIOps affects infrastructure as a whole, changing the way that IT organizations approach datasets, silos, dependencies, event correlation, and other crucial activities.

In turn, what AIOps offers is new application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring tools along with advanced analytics, dashboards, and new data management capabilities. 

With so many broad applications for both enterprises and small businesses, AIOps aligns well with the latest trends and best practices of DevOps, microservices, and multi-cloud environments, while also supporting the overarching theme of improving the user experience.

So, the question is not if it's useful for your business, but what AIOps is able to help with first. 

What are AIOps use cases?

The ideal scenario for implementing AIOps tools is in a business that has wholly adopted an application environment. In this scenario, the IT department is no longer working with a monolith, but instead trying to integrate a variety of on-premises and cloud solutions to keep the business running.

AIOps platforms are a major driver in continued digital transformation, but the implementation of AIOps cannot be treated as a static goal. With technology still advancing, it's difficult to strictly define the concept of what AIOps is.

Because of this, the use cases for AIOps can be broken down into the current use cases and the expected future use cases. 

Current uses of AIOps include proactive performance alerts, automated analysis, and automated remediation activities based on real-time metrics.

For example, as demand spikes for an application, new instances can be created intelligently and automatically, helping to prevent downtime. AIOps can also support a cross-domain understanding of issues and scenarios.  

Right now, the major focus of AIOps is to accelerate and automate routine processes so that humans can regain control over the massive amounts of data IT departments are now tasked with managing.

As the underlying algorithms and technology grow that much more powerful, the future use cases of AIOps will revolve around incredibly fast and accurate predictions along with increased trust in AI-driven decisions. 

When did AIOps become so popular?

Given the sheer importance of technology in keeping a business' doors open, IT departments have become central to business operations.

This recognition has led to a major shift in focus and importance, with more priority being given to IT process improvements to improve response time, efficiency, and resource utilization.  

Ever since Gartner coined the term, they have published multiple reports covering adoption, expected trends, and use cases for AIOps across industries. IBM has also compiled statistics and shared information regarding the increased use and further clarification on what AIOps is. 

As the EMA reports, "It is fair to say that AIOps is, at the very least, likely to pay for itself. Relative to cost, respondents report a high level of value returned to their organizations."

The report published by EMA went on to reveal that all respondents considered their AIOps implementation successful, while one-third was self-reported it as extremely successful. 

All of these reports demonstrate that more businesses are investing AIOps strategies, but it's difficult to pinpoint when the concept began to take off.

Like most trends, it started as a gradual transformation as more businesses realized the benefits of AI and ML, two key components of what has now been dubbed "AIOps." 

Few AIOps characteristics

• The term AIOps was coined by Gartner in 2017 and stands for "artificial intelligence for IT operations."
• AiOps is not a standard, but rather a concept that's still evolving.
• Elements of AIOps include emerging technologies like machine learning and process automation.
• Benefits of AIOps include reducing downtime, streamlining resolutions, optimizing resources, and innovating processes.
• Pursuing AIOps can also help round-out cyber security goals for your organization with automated threat detection and analysis tools. 

Benefits of AIOps

With the help of AIOps, IT teams can identify potential outages in highly complex application environments before they have the chance to impact revenue. Additionally, learning what AIOps is unlocking new opportunities to:

• Reduce downtime: With proactive insights, AIOps helps IT teams spot potential issues before they occur, giving them a head start on fixing or avoiding problems.
• Streamline resolutions: When problems do occur, AIOps can help pinpoint the root cause and guide individuals to a solution more quickly. 
• Optimize resources: By automating certain critical tasks, AIOps allows IT professionals to spend more time making improvements and planning updates.
• Continue innovating: Freeing up time for an IT team opens the doors to further innovations and a higher chance of success for future rollouts.
• Support end-users: In addition to all of its practical benefits for AI operations management, AIOps can also support the end user's workloads with features like natural language processing (NLP) to simplify and speed up the orchestration of both routines and complex tasks. 

These advantages only provide a snapshot of what AIOps is capable of accomplishing if implemented correctly and driven by the right mindset. Another major area of impact is cyber security, as AIOps can support compliance initiatives. 

How AIOps contributes to cybersecurity

Each year, the sophistication and potential damage of cyber threats increase ten-fold. Not only are cybercriminals gaining ground by pitting the latest technology against businesses, but they also stand to gain more and more as businesses inevitably commit to tech-driven data and process solutions. 

It's simply impossible to try and avoid cyber threats, which is why businesses must embrace the topic of cybersecurity and stay ahead of the latest trends and changes.

Given that most of the burden lies on the IT department, there's no doubt that leveraging what AIOps is able to do goes hand-in-hand with cyber security initiatives. 

When AIOps is properly implemented, the IT department will benefit from automated and proactive monitoring, threat detection, and helpful alerts triggered by various organizational activities (e.g., reminders or automated processes to shut down the accounts of a recently terminated employee). 

Whereas many businesses are already using tools for observation of their state of cyber security at any given moment, AIOps opens the doors to new tools for engaging and acting on threats when they arise.

With the help of automation, root cause analysis or remediation could even start to take place before humans get involved. 

Overall, cybersecurity initiatives stand to benefit from understanding what AIOps is in the following ways:

• Better insights and monitoring for all company devices and users. 
• Threat intelligence, including the automated detection and analysis of potential threats.
• Guided and supported remediation activities to help humans work faster.
• Automated alerts for other departments when a threat or remediation may impact service. 

While AIOps is a long way off from being able to handle cyber security without the need for human intervention, businesses that adopt it now stand to gain a major advantage against the latest attackers.

By arming yourself with intelligent solutions to help detect, examine, and overcome cyber threats, your business can gain peace of mind and substantially reduce resource utilization, all while keeping the data that's core to your operations safer. 

Challenges in implementing AIOps

Like any change to internal processes and tools, figuring out what AIOps is and how to use it in your business comes with its own set of challenges.

However, with the opportunity to leverage SaaS providers and integrate different services together, companies stand to benefit from flexible deployment options to find the features that fit their budgets.

The EMA report found that two challenges nearly tied for the top spot, and these included the difficulty of replacing legacy systems and the cost of new technologies. Other top challenges businesses identified included a company skills gap and integration challenges.

Ultimately, the best way to avoid challenges and roadblocks during AIOps adoption is to start with a detailed plan of the specific capabilities you want and how each of those capabilities will positively impact key business objectives. From there, it's a matter of getting the right partner on your side to move forward. 

Partner with AIOps experts

Aside from improving resource utilization, cutting costs, and improving security across the board, the right AIOps solutions will have a larger business impact that can improve accessibility, collaboration, and efficiency across the board.

In turn supporting faster user workflows, better decision-making, and a more integrated customer experience. 

We have helped countless organizations reimagine how they approach crucial activities like managing datasets, eliminating silos, and minimizing dependencies using proven AIOps concepts.

‍Contact us today to learn more about how can your business benefit from leveraging AiOps.