CASA Software driving AIOps in SA enterprises

Tyron Silk, Senior Solutions Architect, CASA Software.

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Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is gaining traction in South African businesses as organisations strive to automate and optimise IT operations, improve efficiency and reduce costs. CASA Software – with its three decades long experience in the SA ICT sector – is a driving force for AIOps in the local market highlighting its value proposition and use cases.

“AIOps leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence, big data and automated decision-making to complete IT tasks. AIOps makes it possible to automate processes that would traditionally require significant manual intervention by humans,” says Tyron Silk, Senior Solutions Architect, CASA Software.

The term AIOps entered the IT lexicon in 2016, when Gartner coined it as part of an effort to understand how data analytics was enabling new efficiencies for IT ops teams. “Today’s IT landscape is a multifaceted one, with traditional IT ops teams struggling to handle ever increasing complexity. This is where automation tools initially came into their own; however, early tools required humans to configure, deploy and manage them, thus limiting the ability to simplify increasingly complex IT environments. AIOps emerged as a better solution to this challenge,” he says.

AIOps, when enriched with automation, provides comprehensive and cohesive insights for the management of tasks that modern infrastructure and software requires.

“AIOps holds tremendous value. Going forward, it will play a key role in enabling new efficiencies for IT teams. It will also enable the adoption of complex next-generation technologies that cannot be managed successfully using traditional solutions. In fact, it’s safe to say businesses of the future won’t survive without the assistance of AIOps,” Silk notes.

“While there’s nothing new in the use of data analytics and machine learning – this has been widespread for years but historically this was essentially limited to basic security and infrastructure monitoring tools. IT operations, or ITOps, also existed as a distinct discipline long before the concept of AIOps appeared. What sets AIOps apart in the innovative stakes is that it brings data-driven insights and ITOps together. Previously, data analytics was used to drive business insights, not to help IT teams do their jobs. Yes, ITOps teams made use of automated tools to help make their work more efficient, but those tools were not typically capable of making complex automated decisions based on data. Moreover, they required significant manual effort to use. AIOps changed this by providing ITOps teams with access to tools that can make advanced decisions and perform automated actions by collecting and analysing data. It represents a much more refined, sophisticated way of integrating data analytics into ITOps. In addition, it helps traditional ITOps admins transition into site reliability engineer (SRE) roles and support more scalable workflows that align with business needs.

AIOps enables ITOps teams to handle highly dynamic infrastructure and software environments, such as IOT devices, containers and serverless platforms more effectively. “In the future it is likely that newer technologies will appear that introduce even more dynamism to the deployment models that ITOps teams must support. While the exact nature of these technologies remains to be seen, it’s a safe bet that AIOps will be a key enabler for managing them.”

Organisations are competing in a world where more than half of users will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load, and in which a one-second delay in page load time results in 7% fewer sales. “Companies can ill afford to leave software availability or performance problems unaddressed for any length of time. While collecting and analysing data in real-time in order to diagnose issues quickly is one component of achieving fast resolution, so is the ability to interpret the problem quickly using AIOps-driven insights. AIOps-enabled solutions can help engineers trace the cause of a problem and suggest remediation approaches so that issues can be resolved virtually as quickly as they appear. This is a powerful motivation for South African companies that have not yet begun adopting AIOps solutions to sit up and take note that now is the time for assessing, planning and implementing these tools to drive business value.”

Silk confirms that 2025 will see AIOps transitioning from a reactive problem-solving role to one of proactive, predictive capabilities, driven by the convergence of AIOps and business intelligence. “This evolution will see AIOps platforms automating tasks, providing data-driven insights and enabling more efficient and collaborative IT operations, with significant commercial benefits. If South African companies want to harness the clout that AIOps can bring to their market offerings, they must contact CASA Software as the first step to propelling them to the forefront ahead of their competitors,” concludes Silk.