Andrew Hewitt-Coleman, Red Hat Synergy lead for Hybrid Cloud integration at IBM South Africa

Enterprise IT service management has become an increasingly thankless task, as service desks wade through thousands of tickets monthly and grapple with getting to the root of problems in an increasingly complex cloud environment.

Donovan Marais, IT Service Management Architect at IBM South Africa, says: “As organisations move infrastructure, services and applications to the cloud, we see environments becoming more complex, generating more events and more data. Cloud everywhere means more and more information, and more and more events. In fact, it can now take an enterprise around four-and-a-half hours to resolve a single event, because when that ticket comes in, it can be passed around to an average of 17 people."

Says Andrew Hewitt-Coleman, Red Hat Synergy lead for Hybrid Cloud integration at IBM South Africa: “In most enterprises, thousands of tickets are logged monthly. On top of that, there are hundreds of times more data in many more systems than we managed just a few years ago. Alerts and tickets are taking longer to resolve because it is more challenging to determine where the problem lies in this complex hybrid environment. Infrastructure, applications and services are working together and becoming more intertwined across on-premises and cloud, and you need to ensure that you can effectively manage this hybrid cloud environment. The faster you can find the problem in the complex intertwined environment, the faster you can resolve it.” Ideally, he says, enterprises should be able to predict and prevent the problem from occurring at all.

Marais says by using analytics and AI, the typical four-and-a-half hour turnaround time can be reduced to just over a quarter of an hour, improving service delivery and freeing scarce skills to work on innovation instead of ‘keeping the lights on’.

Analytics and AI also deliver ongoing improvements in IT service management, they say. “Data might be seen as the new gold – it becomes more valuable the more you refine it and work it. In this space, analytics and AI help you to make the data from your systems more valuable over time,” Hewitt-Coleman says.

IBM has overcome IT service management challenges by introducing Watson AIOps, which identifies and gathers signals across a variety of structured and unstructured data channels, including alerts, logs and tickets, to deliver real-time alerts with incident reports pointing to the problem and potentially affected services, and also pulls insights from past incidents to recommend a solution. IBM will host an executive webinar, AI-powered IT incident resolution, on 25 November. For more information and to register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/ibm-data-driven-aiops-executive/index.html.