Each year, financial services organizations handle billions of transactions, through which trillions of dollars of commerce flow. Customers expect key services, from online banking and cash transfers to payroll services, to be available around the clock, just as they expect their assets, data, and identities to be kept secure. Meanwhile, financial institutions themselves must be able to maintain ongoing communication with clearing houses, stock markets, payment processors, and other relevant parties.

Congratulations to Dave Link, CEO and founder of ScienceLogic for being named a 2024 MeriTalk Cyber Defender! Each year, MeriTalk celebrates outstanding leadership in cyber innovation within the federal government IT community. The prestigious Cyber Defenders Awards honor government and industry individuals who are at the forefront of safeguarding government systems from complex cyber-attacks, leading cyber modernization progress, and driving our nation’s cybersecurity.

Savvy organizations are embarking on a journey toward Autonomic IT to better manage their IT environments, particularly as hybrid configurations grow in popularity and are accompanied by greater complexity. Driven by AI and automation, Autonomic IT can help organizations optimize resource allocation, improve the effectiveness of maintenance efforts, avoid downtime, and keep end users happy.

As technology evolves and IT systems become too complex for humans alone to manage, enterprises need to work towards an autonomous business model. This state – known as “Autonomic IT” – unlocks the transformative potential of automation and generative AI to help businesses resolve issues faster, minimize customer interruptions, and drive innovation. However, achieving an Autonomic IT state is not a simple plug-and-play process. It is a gradual evolution, a journey.

IT service outages, while inconvenient, also carry widespread ramifications that affect productivity, revenue streams, business reputation, and customer satisfaction. These outages can also drive burnout and increased human error for the IT operations (ITOps) teams tasked with managing the stress that comes with urgent issues and escalations.

Of all the KPIs that gauge the health and operational fitness of an enterprise, Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) from an outage or downtime is one of the most crucial. Yet while MTTR is a universally recognized metric, many organizations still fail to consider the total cost of MTTR when deciding where and how to invest in their IT environments.

Tool sprawl, further compounded by the inflexibility of legacy tools, poses a major challenge for government IT teams. As agencies work to deliver the digital services their constituents demand, their digital ecosystems have grown to comprise numerous apps, systems and microservices, all specific to the individual IT components of the experience. With disparate tools and systems leading to siloed insights, higher costs, and increased complexity, it’s easy for technical debt to get out of hand.

Modern IT infrastructures are more than just a support system; they are the beating heart of business innovation and success. However, these environments are incredibly complex, which comes with information silos and a lack of visibility, posing a significant barrier to Autonomic IT. One of the main factors contributing to IT operations’ reaching this point of complexity is the growing use of cloud services.