Evolving from AIOps to Next-Gen Intelligent Ops

Want to learn more? Dive deeper with our comprehensive Intelligent Ops guide.

Currently, an estimated 30% of companies are actively using AIOps, a technology focused primarily on IT automation and incident remediation, with another 44% taking steps to implement it, according to Statista. These enterprises are tapping into AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) to refine manual workflows and bolster business operations.

Yet, as AI continues to advance, its potential applications have expanded. This brings us to Intelligent Ops. At Neudesic, we view Intelligent Ops as the natural progression from AIOps. It encompasses not only IT automation but also provides holistic business solutions, powered by the latest AI innovations.

What Exactly is AIOps?

AIOps stands for "Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations". It pertains to the improvements in IT operations made possible through data analytics, machine learning, and AI. Organizations use AIOps to monitor their IT infrastructure, automate routine tasks, and respond to security incidents using established playbooks more effectively.

While AIOps has indeed revolutionized IT automation, its purview is still somewhat restricted. It is centered around pre-set playbooks, ticket management, and a specific concentration on security automation. These limitations present themselves in many ways:

• Reliance on Human Intervention: Although AIOps aims to amplify efficiency with intelligent automation, it frequently depends on playbooks crafted by humans. This confines the extent to which AIOps can support IT departments.
• Excessive Ticket Clutter: A common trait of AIOps platforms is their emphasis on generating, managing, and resolving tickets for IT issues. Trying to simplify intricate systems into mere ticketed items might overlook vital details, leading to decisions that might not align with the broader business objectives.
• Lack of Data Integration: AIOps relies on data from various sources, and integrating this data can be challenging. Different data formats, sources, and APIs can make it difficult to aggregate information for end-to-end observability.

Going beyond AIOps: Intelligent Ops

Intelligent Ops takes AIOps a step further to develop processes, tools, and systems that support the entire business, rather than focusing primarily on IT automation and incident remediation. While AIOps is centered on IT automation, Intelligent Ops extends a more comprehensive view, integrating the three fundamental pillars of IT operations:

• AIOps: Integrated and pervasive monitoring amplifies visibility and command over intricate IT landscapes.
• FinOps: Detailed visibility and control curtail the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through strategic optimization.
• SecOps: Advanced AI and embedded cloud services expedite the identification and resolution of IT and security incidents.

Consider a scenario where an organization is developing a new internal tool. This heaps significant work— like building the development environments they create, defining access controls, and managing the development and deployment environments—and risk on the operational and product teams.

Intelligent Ops offers the opportunity to streamline and automate this process:

• AIOps: Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate the creation and configuration of development environments based on trusted configurations.
• SecOps: Automate the creation and governance of accounts on the platform, while maintaining continuous reporting of anomalies and potential security risks.
• FinOps: Clearly define, monitor, and uphold budgets, ensuring the platform operates in a manner that optimizes ROI (return on investment) for the enterprise.

Performing these tasks manually is resource intensive, and AIOps only addresses part of the picture. Intelligent Ops offers an automated, coordinated approach, enabling the organization to achieve more consistent visibility and derive insights and benefits from the additional context.

Understanding the benefits of Intelligent Ops

Intelligent Ops is transforming the enterprise landscape, especially when it comes to amplifying the customer experience. Its significance can be seen in three primary areas: improved efficiency, bolstered security, and increased reliability.

Increased Efficiency

At its core, Intelligent Ops integrates machine learning and intelligent automation across the entirety of a business, not just a specific segment. It gathers data from the vast reaches of an organization’s IT environment, sifting through to spot trends, anomalies, and other pertinent insights. The results of this analysis are conveniently accessible to Ops teams through a user-friendly interface like ChatGPT.

By expanding the focus beyond AIOps to incorporate FinOps and the organization’s business cases, Intelligent Ops provides a few benefits to any organization, including:

• Reduced OpEx: Intelligent Ops provides operations teams with the visibility and context required to identify inefficiencies and unnecessary redundancy in complex IT systems. This enables them to streamline processes to reduce cloud spending.
• Sustainable computing: There is an environmental edge, too. Intelligent Ops can also enable organizations to make progress toward their sustainability goals. By eliminating redundancy and inefficiencies, companies can decrease their infrastructure and carbon footprint by reducing or eliminating the estimated 32% wasted compute in-cloud environments.

Consider this: traditional on-prem data centers commonly operate at 20-40% utilization. By tracking historical patterns of resource utilization, Intelligent Ops can provide suggestions on how to optimize resource utilization. This includes eliminating or consolidating unused or underutilized resources and maintaining a shared pool of resources for on-demand scaling rather than overprovisioning to protect against sudden surges.

Enhanced security

Much like AIOps, a significant aspect of Intelligent Ops is enhancing an organization’s incident detection and subsequent response, however, takes it a step further. It is always on the lookout, monitoring for potential hiccups within the IT realm, and is even equipped to draft and roll out remediation strategies.

This proactive approach to security can help to improve an organization’s cyber threat exposure and security maturity in several ways, including:

• Threat prevention: Intelligent Ops proactively identifies potential future threats – including both known and unknown issues – and draws attention to them. This helps security teams to address the issue – with the help of intelligent automation – before it becomes a real problem.
• Simplified root cause analysis: Determining the root cause of an IT issue or security incident is essential to addressing the problem and preventing recurrence. Intelligent Ops uses AI to analyze data, providing an efficient way to identify the root cause of known and unknown issues.
• Enhanced security visibility: With an interface that echoes ChatGPT, Intelligent Ops presents all an organization’s security data in a digestible format. This interactive setup empowers security professionals, allowing them to make straightforward queries and receive comprehensive answers, enhancing their understanding of the security landscape.

Consider another scenario where an IT leader at a Fortune 5000 company receiving an alert from their Intelligent Ops system about an unusual access pattern on their primary data server. Instead of flagging this anomaly, the system – drawing on proprietary SecOps principles – starts a deeper analysis. It swiftly discerns a correlation between the observed pattern and a recently documented exploit technique.

Without needing human authorization, the Intelligent Ops system autonomously initiates a recommended remediation protocol. The anomaly is promptly resolved. Following this, the system generates a comprehensive analysis of the root cause, equipping the IT team with the insights needed to further fortify their infrastructure.

Greater Reliability

Intelligent Ops provides organizations with the tools to proactively identify and correct issues in their IT environments. This enhances the reliability of IT systems by preventing potential issues from growing into major problems.

Here are some standout benefits that Intelligent Ops provides:

• Proactive issue remediation: Proactively identifying potential issues allows Ops teams to address them before they become a major problem. This is faster, easier, and less expensive than remediating a full-blown outage or cybersecurity incident.
• Decreased remediation time: With its capability to offer remediation suggestions and automated support, Intelligent Ops trims down the Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR), mitigating the financial and operational impacts of incidents. This further prevents potential problems from spiraling into larger, more disruptive challenges for businesses.
• Greater customer satisfaction: Improved reliability means that an organization’s services are available when customers need them. Intelligent Ops enhances customer satisfaction and reduces the risk of penalties due to broken service level agreements (SLAs).

Where AIOps might address a segment of the operations picture, Intelligent Ops provides the comprehensive building blocks essential for sourcing, processing, and analyzing telemetry data across all workloads using state-of-the-art AI/ML platforms.