As the digital transformation accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, business revenues became increasingly dependent on digital services while the information technology infrastructure behind these solutions in turn gained layers of complexity.

Because of this, automating IT operations through artificial intelligence operations helps free up teams for more important tasks. This effort to increase operational efficiency is crucial, according to Rich Lane (pictured), senior research analyst, infrastructure and operations, at Forrester Research Inc.

“What we mean is getting the head count we have back to working on higher-level things, working on technology refreshes and project work that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of low-complexity [and] high-volume tasks that they’re spending at least 20%, if not more, of their day,” Lane said.

Lane spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AIOps Virtual Forum. They discussed IT challenges in the current digital age, the need for automation and smart analytics to improve the customer experience, and the obstacles companies face to make the necessary changes. (* Disclosure below.)

Automation and smart analytics are key

The best way to reduce teams’ superfluous tasks is to apply automation and smart analytics within an AIOps platform, according to Lane. With AIOps, businesses benefit from multi-layered technology tapping analytics and machine learning to analyze data collected from various applications and end-user devices in order to automatically react to issues in real time.

“If you look at where infrastructure operations people are today, and especially [during the last] eight months and nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic, a lot of them are getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again just trying to keep the lights on,” Lane said. “We should automate those things.”

AIOps enables automation and enhances IT operations because it brings together data from a highly distributed environment to facilitate collaboration between business teams, developers and IT operations. These teams often have siloed tools, making it difficult to identify and solve problems when an incident occurs, according to Lane.

“When we bring all that data under one umbrella, one data lake … apply smart analytics to that data and normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from point A to point B, all the way through the application infrastructure stack, now the conversation changes,” he explained. “The conversation changes to: ‘Here is the problem. How are we going to fix it?’And that’s really valuable.”

This process will also be much faster, as the problem will be identified immediately and not just after hours of hunting. As a result, teams can stop focusing on data center performance metrics to examine business performance metrics.

“How are we performing as a business? How are we overall and in real time?” Lane stated. “Whether operations people like it or not, we are all in the customer experience business now, and we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and development partners to make sure we’re delivering the highest level of customer experience we can.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AIOps Virtual Forum. (* 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: SiliconANGLE