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How Much Does Your IT Operations Really Cost?

Mohan Kompella

With the complex, dynamic nature of today's IT stack and the operational processes that support it, IT operations teams are finding they need to constantly grow their resources to manage all the moving pieces. This can get expensive … but how much are they spending?


The answer is often surprising. Complexity has made it hard to quantify how much excess resources are being wasted on simply dealing with new processes and challenges that relate to growth. Sorting through noise, filtering the signals that matter, recognizing and troubleshooting, sharing with distributed teams — all of these processes become more complex as organizations grow and environments modernize. AIOps solutions can help recoup some of these wasted resources — but how much? To understand the true cost of IT operations and the value AIOps can provide them, it helps to deep-dive into how key roles and processes in IT organizations have transformed, and how these changes are impacting the way IT operations teams need to operate.

Business Value Assessment

The key to understanding the actual cost of your IT operations lies in assessing the impact of several core metrics on your performance and processes. Along the way, you also identify where AIOps improvements can make the biggest difference and determine the actual financial value of an AIOps adoption project.

These are detailed in the following image:


■ Major incidents — their volume and MTTR help quantify your average service downtime — which basically means your Operational Efficiency.

■ Minor incidents — their volume, MTTR, and time spent on handling them — all amount to your Operational Performance in man-hours.

■ Incident management processes — determining the amount of time you spend on each of your incident management life cycle phases allows you to understand where the most improvement is needed.

■ The maturity of your tools and processes — allows you to identify how much you will need to invest in improvement through AIOps adoption, and how much value can be achieved.

■ Your headcount — identifying exactly how many people are involved in your IT operations, directly and indirectly, helps close the loop on Opex.

Closing the Gap: AIOps to the Rescue

AIOps de-risks digital transformation initiatives by allowing IT operations teams to handle the data and complexity that these transformations bring to the table. It does so by providing IT Ops with several capabilities detailed in the following illustration:


What are the quantitative values of AIOps?

■ AIOps gets rid of the noise. Whether it's multiple alerts stemming from the same problem, or a change that caused an alert storm, AIOps identifies and eliminates that noise before IT Ops spends time on it. Correlation, maintenance-based alert squelching both equate to fewer incidents. Typically, 50% or more of incidents are non-actionable noise.

■ AIOps helps quickly diagnose and identify the root cause of an incident. That means teams can start remediating sooner and with more certainty.

■ AIOps provides automation. That means everything from a unified ops console to automated incident workflow to auto-triggering of remediation actions. Overall, it means speed and accuracy for every incident dealt with or lower MTTR.

■ These benefits enable organizations to reclaim engineering time and put it to use on transformation initiatives. These also mean improvements to Service Availability.

Once you assess the actual costs of your IT operations and calculate the quantitative values AIOps can bring you — you can make an educated decision on where and how to improve.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

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How Much Does Your IT Operations Really Cost?

Mohan Kompella

With the complex, dynamic nature of today's IT stack and the operational processes that support it, IT operations teams are finding they need to constantly grow their resources to manage all the moving pieces. This can get expensive … but how much are they spending?


The answer is often surprising. Complexity has made it hard to quantify how much excess resources are being wasted on simply dealing with new processes and challenges that relate to growth. Sorting through noise, filtering the signals that matter, recognizing and troubleshooting, sharing with distributed teams — all of these processes become more complex as organizations grow and environments modernize. AIOps solutions can help recoup some of these wasted resources — but how much? To understand the true cost of IT operations and the value AIOps can provide them, it helps to deep-dive into how key roles and processes in IT organizations have transformed, and how these changes are impacting the way IT operations teams need to operate.

Business Value Assessment

The key to understanding the actual cost of your IT operations lies in assessing the impact of several core metrics on your performance and processes. Along the way, you also identify where AIOps improvements can make the biggest difference and determine the actual financial value of an AIOps adoption project.

These are detailed in the following image:


■ Major incidents — their volume and MTTR help quantify your average service downtime — which basically means your Operational Efficiency.

■ Minor incidents — their volume, MTTR, and time spent on handling them — all amount to your Operational Performance in man-hours.

■ Incident management processes — determining the amount of time you spend on each of your incident management life cycle phases allows you to understand where the most improvement is needed.

■ The maturity of your tools and processes — allows you to identify how much you will need to invest in improvement through AIOps adoption, and how much value can be achieved.

■ Your headcount — identifying exactly how many people are involved in your IT operations, directly and indirectly, helps close the loop on Opex.

Closing the Gap: AIOps to the Rescue

AIOps de-risks digital transformation initiatives by allowing IT operations teams to handle the data and complexity that these transformations bring to the table. It does so by providing IT Ops with several capabilities detailed in the following illustration:


What are the quantitative values of AIOps?

■ AIOps gets rid of the noise. Whether it's multiple alerts stemming from the same problem, or a change that caused an alert storm, AIOps identifies and eliminates that noise before IT Ops spends time on it. Correlation, maintenance-based alert squelching both equate to fewer incidents. Typically, 50% or more of incidents are non-actionable noise.

■ AIOps helps quickly diagnose and identify the root cause of an incident. That means teams can start remediating sooner and with more certainty.

■ AIOps provides automation. That means everything from a unified ops console to automated incident workflow to auto-triggering of remediation actions. Overall, it means speed and accuracy for every incident dealt with or lower MTTR.

■ These benefits enable organizations to reclaim engineering time and put it to use on transformation initiatives. These also mean improvements to Service Availability.

Once you assess the actual costs of your IT operations and calculate the quantitative values AIOps can bring you — you can make an educated decision on where and how to improve.

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...