Remote IT Operations is the New Norm

IT in Times of Crisis

IT operations pros worldwide are instantly part of wartime environments.  They are supporting a massive number of people transitioning to remote work, shifting work models, and in most cases, extended hours.  While the COVID-19 virus is putting a severe strain on corporate networks, servers, and security policies, it may also be causing major traffic jams on customer-facing websites.  This is especially true for consumer-facing businesses in retail, healthcare and financial services.  Above all, the new IT reality is testing each organization’s ability to deal with the unexpected and unplanned¹.

According to Accenture², the transition that many leading companies have been pursuing towards digital businesses must continue and even accelerate during times of crisis.  Some of the critical business areas impacted are Operations, Commerce, User Experience, Supply Chain, Leadership, and the Workplace.  Each one of these areas is essential to business requiring a holistic approach to digital transformation.

While we hope there will not be another event of this magnitude, changes that became necessary during these last few months will persist – the IT evolution will need to adapt to this new reality.  Agility and adaptability are not buzz words anymore and have become an essential part of modern IT managements’ DNA.  IT systems must adapt to a new, ever-changing, ever-evolving reality, implying that many assumptions companies had regarding their information technology ecosystems are no longer valid.

The Unexpected Demand Scenario

What happens when operations support systems such as remote access or VPN systems suddenly expand from serving 25% of the company to 100%, becoming business-critical?  As workloads shift and secondary systems become business-critical, performance management becomes the only way to cope with the lack of resources in an on-premise or hybrid operating model.

Capacity planning is usually completed in advance according to trends with relatively constant consumption dynamics.  In on-premise and hybrid architectures, new purchases may take months to provision.  The only answer to cope with existing systems constraints and maintain regular operations is to have automation through an AIOps platform that can: (1) detect and even predict these new demands on systems; (2) detect performance problems proactively; and (3) execute remediation measures automatically to keep the systems performing optimally.

Deal with the New Reality

In the new reality, the transition from traditional, static, rules-based monitoring to dynamic AIOps is essential.  Modern IT management teams can no longer wait for trends to become obvious as future operating behaviors will become more dynamic, more frequent and less predictable.  Traditional monitoring and event management systems are based on static thresholds that primarily rely on assumptions derived from past experiences.  As operating scenarios change rapidly in the new paradigm, dynamic behavioral analysis becomes the new doctrine for modern IT Operations.  The manual adjusting of alert thresholds, the lack of correlation across interdependent domains, and reactive alarms are no longer acceptable when an average company may have more than 2,500 performance metrics per unique business service.

Driverless, IT Operations

Proactive analytics and automated responses are the new norm and ensure optimal system performance. Functionality like these will allow modern IT management teams to rapidly adapt to these new, unexpected realities without serious disruptions to current operations.

Centerity offers a modern AIOps platform married with Cyber AIOps capabilities that automatically learns the behavior of critical applications and business processes by using machine learning on a Big Data, Time-Series platform that can adapt dynamically without the need for human intervention.

As a result, IT management is empowered to adapt to new, unexpected realities in a matter of days without disrupting current operations.

1. https://blog.opsramp.com/coronavirus-it-operations-reading-list?utm_campaign=FY20%20Q1%20-%20Spring%202020%20Newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=85497904&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8e4Hu79oscIEjeueRk3vIvEAaSJ7MlGL7vG3PDGQOiT7JJfdzlVsxoaHX3C8Gr_1VIJMFz9k-5Qc6zfoe3Bjr7AnRkMQ&_hsmi=85497904
2. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/about/company/coronavirus-business-economic-impact