The American essayist Charles Dudley Warner once wrote that “simplicity is making this journey of life with just baggage enough.” His motto could have easily covered movement of today’s IT community toward AIOps, with a keen desire to shed as much operational baggage as possible.

A single cloud migration can create new layers of operational complexity that many companies are often unable to handle from either a personnel or systems support perspective. This dynamic has given a turbo boost to the AIOps field, where big data and artificial intelligence tools can automate and enhance IT operations that are increasingly dependent on critical applications.

“The challenge is that behind each digital app is massive complexity — hundreds of interwoven services developed by a mix of proprietary and open-source contributors connecting mainframe and multicloud infrastructures with billions of end-user devices,” said Per Kroll, senior director, R&D for DevOps, AIOps and Open Mainframe at Broadcom Inc., in a recent blog post. “These digital demands are driving exponential growth of data and transaction volumes, making it increasingly difficult for IT operations to keep up.”

To help the enterprise computing world keep pace, a Broadcom mini-event — the AIOps Virtual Forum — will be held Dec. 3 at 11 a.m. PST. The event follows news of Broadcom’s open platform launch for full-stack AIOps observability, claiming an industry first.

TheCUBE’s coverage of the forum will include interviews with Broadcom executives and industry thought leaders with a focus on how AIOps can transform IT organizations by augmenting human intelligence, finding new ways to automate remediation of network issues, and leveraging the power of AI to do more with less in 2021. (* Disclosure below.)

AI at scale helps cloud’s evolution

Gartner has predicted that large enterprise use of AIOps to monitor applications and infrastructure will rise to 30% by 2023. This growth will be fueled by a steady march to the cloud and a need to ensure the use of advanced analytics and automation to avoid costly application downtime. Concurrent with enterprise migration to the cloud has been AI advancement. It might not have been plausible five years ago that AI could run operations at scale. That has now become a viable option in 2020.

A key element behind the growth of AIOps is its role in elevating the influence of IT organizations within enterprises. Smoothly functioning data flows power the applications that run many businesses, and IT now sits at the center in making that engine run effectively.

This reality has forced companies to break down organizational silos where “fiefdoms” competed to provide the most relevant data. When an operational alert triggers the opening of an AIOps-driven action, the technology populates recommended solutions with data drawn from the most appropriate sources. AIOps is about converting outputs to outcomes.

This evolution has resulted in advances for one of the most critical elements of AIOps: security. Monitoring the performance of any network today means monitoring threats, and AI and machine learning offer the ability to empower security analysts with enough information from log files and endpoint operations to identify patterns of potential attack.

One example of this comes from British gas distribution company SGN. Serving nearly 6 million homes in the United Kingdom, SGN turns to Broadcom-owned Symantec for managed security services.    

“[Symantec] MSS is really important and has helped us accelerate our maturity,” said Mo Ahddoud, chief information security officer for SGN, in a published case study. “Symantec correlates a host of alerts from different log sources and provides understanding, whether it’s seen that risk from an alert in the global threat portfolio or maybe we’ve defined a response playbook that runs within the organization.”

AIOps is emerging as a key solution in the toolbox for enterprises grappling with preparedness for remote work and transformation of business operations at scale. It is also a disruptive force, reshaping IT operations management at a time when cloud migration, security and data availability are taking center stage. Future adoption and use of AIOps will likely determine how companies adapt to a rapidly changing enterprise landscape.

Livestream of the AIOps Virtual Forum

The AIOps Virtual Forum is a livestream event with interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of the AIOps Virtual Forum, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the AIOps Virtual Forum virtual conference

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the AIOps Virtual Forum include Sreenivasan Rajagopal, head of AIOps products and strategy at Broadcom; Rich Lane, senior research analyst, infrastructure and operations, at Forrester Research; and Usman Nasir, global product management at Verizon.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AIOps Virtual Forum. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Broadcom