The global pandemic has radically changed how enterprise IT services are consumed, both in the short and long term. Here's how AIOps can help IT Ops teams:

Start with The New Normal for IT Ops Deepens Need for AI - Part 1

Managing the New Normal

The new normal includes not only periodic recurrences of Covid-19 outbreaks but also the periodic emergence of new global pandemics. This means putting in place at least three layers of digital business continuity practice:

■ Continuity for illness-free periods

■ Continuity for periods marked by known pandemics

■ Continuity for periods marked by new pandemics

Rules-based, historical data analysis, and predictive analysis based on history become useless in this scenario. Instead, what's needed is technology that can anticipate outages without reliance on stable historical patterns, as AIOps does.

Significant economic contraction and resulting pressure on both capital and operational expenditures will lead to chronic understaffing of IT operations and NOC functions. IT Ops can leverage AIOps to achieve heightened levels of automation and to support radically deep cuts in the number of tools required to both monitor the digital infrastructure and respond to incidents that occur.

As remote work becomes default, it will become impossible to replicate the "monitoring cockpit" experience or the "service desk cockpit" experience. IT operations team members and first responders will need to get by with standard IT management software. That requires a significant increase in the number of signals that require observation on the one hand and the number of tickets which require response on the other hand. AIOps can help to manage this by reducing signals and tickets.

Optimizing the New Normal

The move to an almost entirely virtualized infrastructure and service portfolio will allow for maximum agility and the ability to reconfigure people, processes and technologies to meet emerging business needs (which will themselves likely be novel in the new normal.) To provide continuous assurance of service levels (even as the services themselves evolve), IT Ops teams can leverage AIOps and its ability to anticipate outages and brown-outs on the basis of data as it arrives, as opposed to pre-existing static models of topology and user behaviour.

The shift from an IT budget that, beyond labor commitments, is dominated by capital expenditures and maintenance, to one that is almost entirely dominated by renewable operational expenditures, will increase business resilience in the face of the three types of continuity issues outlined above. AIOps can help in this area as well by helping to anticipate short-term fluctuations in resource requirements based on the possibility of looming outages and brown-outs.

The economic contraction will accelerate digitalization and, in fact, lead to what may be called "maximum digitalization" with the consequence that, for the most part, business process events will be IT system state changes. One will not be able to manage business processes unless one simultaneously manages IT system events. AIOps can be invaluable here by effectively discovering and managing the higher-level IT system event patterns that are, in fact, business process patterns.