The Modern NOC IT Ops Predictions for 2017

We will see AIOps tools become crucial to the success of enterprise IT.

Businesses will increasingly adopt AIOps tools and processes.

In order to keep up with the exponential scale, complexity and agility of IT applications and infrastructure, operations teams will increasingly embrace algorithmic solutions to replace traditionally manual tasks and processes. In fact, this area of the business is so important that Gartner recently coined a new term to categorize technologies that facilitate this transformation: AIOps (algorithmic IT operations). AIOps platforms provide IT Operations with situational awareness and diagnostic capabilities not previously available from manual techniques. In 2017, we will see these tools become crucial to the success of enterprise IT, as organizations wake up to the fact that the only way they can offer highly available and reliable services is by applying an algorithmic approach to streamline operations and provide more robust digital customer experiences.

01

For IT, it’s the signing on the dotted line that marks the beginning of long and challenging journey.

02 2016 smashed M&A records. In 2017 IT picks up the pieces.

2016 was the year of the “megamerger”, with deal volumes reaching about $489 billion in October, the highest record of M&A activity in about 12 years. But for IT, it’s the signing on the dotted line that marks the beginning of long and challenging journey, namely: aligning various teams, IT stacks, and monitoring infrastructures into one well-oiled operation. In many cases, merging organizations find that their legacy environments are simply too complex and messy to successfully migrate to a new operating and monitoring stack, and therefore continue to be maintained as distinct environments. The challenge here is that the organization’s approach to monitoring becomes highly fragmented, with each line of business using their own tools, monitoring their own systems, and maintaining their own applications. In order to ensure synergy and transparency across the enterprise, IT should seek to implement tools that offer unified event management and reporting to centralize visibility across their diverse monitoring stack.

While five nines availability has become an industry benchmark for reliability, it’s no longer enough.

03 Customer experience becomes a c-level job.

According to new results from the upcoming State of Monitoring 2017 Report (available Feb, 2017), 73% of IT professionals cite that their performance is measured by customer satisfaction, far outranking “traditional” IT performance metrics, such as incident volume and MTTR. The result is a clear indicator of the crucial role that the digital customer experience plays, now more than ever, as a key competitive differentiator.

While five nines (99.999%) availability has become an industry benchmark for reliability, it’s no longer enough. Digital customers have come to expect consistent uptime, low error rates, and lightning-quick response times as standard. Reliability is just one part of the equation – but it’s a given. Fail here – even once – and you risk losing customers for life. The difference between “expected customer experience” and “great customer experience” lies in other factors, such as usability, personalization, cross-platform support, and customer service. As a result, we predict that customer experience will increasingly become a C-level job, and the CXO title will become ever more commonplace at larger organizations.

There is no doubt that cloud adoption will continue to rise...and for more and more enterprise organizations, it won’t be if, but how.

04 Cloud migration reigns supreme amid growing confidence in security.

According to the latest State of Monitoring Report, the number of organizations that report using cloud services is at 58%, a majority that remains strong even among large enterprises (5000+ employees) at 56%. Perhaps little surprise, as all indicators point to the continued success and growth of the cloud, even in traditionally conservative industries like healthcare and financial services. In fact, global adoption of cloud services in healthcare is expected to nearly triple by 2020 and major banks, such as Capital One and ING, have already green-lit the use of AWS. According to a 2016 study by the Cloud Security Alliance, an overwhelming 71% of IT pros say that their companies have plans to offer greater cloud support to lines of business.

While security has long been singled out as a key reason why organizations shy away from the cloud, there is evidence to suggest that perhaps compliance is the greater barrier. For example, CSA found that “the ability to enforce corporate security policies” was listed as the primary reason why IT leaders would refuse to move their systems of record to the cloud, yet 65% stated that they thought that the cloud is “as secure or more secure than on-premises software. So there is no doubt that cloud adoption will continue to rise in 2017 – and for more and more enterprise organizations, it won’t be “if”, but “how”. Successful migration will depend on companies taking a critical look at which of their services should shift, whether a public or private cloud is more appropriate, and adopting a culture of security that sets standards to hold both vendors and internal stakeholders accountable.

83% of IT pros cite a concern with successfully staffing and retaining qualified team members.

05 The pain of the IT skills gap drives a focus on retention and automation.According to the latest State of Monitoring report, 83% of IT pros surveyed cited a concern with successfully staffing and retaining qualified team members in 2017. Perhaps no surprise, given widespread perception of an ever-widening gap between the demand for IT talent and the number of qualified candidates. To combat this pain, we predict that organizations will focus on investing in the right tools to not only enable better service levels, but to fight burnout and boost retention. According to PayScale’s “Companies with the Most and Least Loyal Employees” report for 2014, the median employee tenure for more than half of all Fortune 500 companies is 3.7 years, but for IT groups is only 1.1 years. Providing IT pros with budget for the right tools not only empowers them to do their job more successfully, but also relieves the strain on human resources.

On the service assurance side, It has long been clear that automation is the only way for IT ops to successfully support the scale and agility of modern apps and infrastructure. Enterprise orgs can’t support initiatives like continuous integration and continuous delivery or five nines uptime if IT still relies heavily on manual processes. To set themselves up for long-term success, IT leaders need to critically evaluate every part of their operations strategy and look for areas which may be throttled by manual bottlenecks. In many cases, this gap exists between monitoring and ticketing, as ops teams cannot successfully automate directly from their monitoring stack due to high alert volumes. As such, we predict that enterprise orgs will focus on investing in the right solutions for event management to aid in filtering noise and facilitating automation.

Agile is no longer a novelty of startups or software companies.

06 DevOps adoption at enterprise organizations is on the rise.

According to the State of Monitoring 2017, DevOps adoption is up 8% over last year at enterprise organizations (5000+ employees). Agile development is also on the rise, with production code changes now taking place on a weekly basis at the majority of enterprise orgs, rather than monthly. Similarly, infrastructure changes are also occurring more frequently. In 2016, the majority of respondents reported making changes to infrastructure on a yearly basis, while in 2017, monthly changes are most common.

This signals a widespread cultural shift in the way that organizations are approaching product and business development. Agile is no longer a novelty of startups or software companies. All organizations, regardless of their size or industry, are waking up to the fact that uptime, reliability, and speed to market are mission critical to remaining competitive and relevant. To support “the new norm”, enterprise organizations must find a way to embrace modernization, while successfully maintaining legacy environments. This means not only investing in the right tools to support automation across their stack (from deployment to monitoring to service assurance), but focusing on how to integrate – rather than retool – legacy monitoring stacks into future operations.

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