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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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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

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...