The true financial harm of downtime is significant. As of Aug 11, 2022, each minute costs an average of $9,000, according to the Ponemon Institute, raising the downtime cost per hour to over $500,000. It goes without saying that network outages hurt revenue, kill productivity, and harm the corporate brand, as well as the reputations of professionals who may be dragged into the mess.
Between on-premises data centers and private, public, and hybrid clouds, today's networks have never leveraged a more comprehensive range of technologies, nor have those technologies been this interconnected. The result is that networks are now far more capable than ever before, and are able to augment their capabilities by leveraging other technologies to their highest and best use.
Complex environments are notorious for generating a high volume of alerts. For IT teams, this deluge presents a critical, time-consuming challenge. Managing alerts and incident response keeps these busy professionals under constant pressure and risks alert fatigue. Nonstop “noise” can desensitize people and actually lead to missed or ignored alerts—risking delayed responses and downtime. These high stakes make handling alerts a key security and productivity issue.
The current state of the economy has left many companies in a state of uncertainty, with 58% of business leaders feeling the pressure of too many initiatives to be supported without the right resources. While these companies look for ways to stay competitive and, in many instances, to accomplish more with less, compromising on delivering high-quality experiences is not an option, particularly in a world where fast, seamless digital experiences have become the norm.
Operations management—whether IT, business, sales, marketing, etc.—has four essential main objectives: And in any industry, those objectives are driven by the most important goal, which is to generate revenue for the organization. While every single task or implementation may not directly impact revenue, the outcome of small improvements over time can be substantial. After a Google search for motivational quotes, I stumbled on James Clear’s “power of tiny gains” concept.
Even in the most structured environments with clear operational strategies, complexity build-up in infrastructure and operations is unavoidable as businesses grow. To help these environments thrive in a consistent, reliable way, it’s vital to optimize the IT function: the backbone that supports every business application and ensures service excellence across all other functions. Automating operations is the only way for IT to scale and support today’s business demands.
Have you ever patched your servers using scripts only to realize that you missed another script for pre-update configuration compliance that had to run beforehand? Most IT organizations start with scripting simple, repetitive tasks in either Python, PowerShell, or Perl to help provide the quickest ROI. Common pain points solved for are creating user accounts, installing patches, software, and provisioning resources such as virtual machines (VMs), etc.
In a world where everyone across the enterprise requires the network, the Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) team has a lot on their plate. Business units, departments, and even individual employees often need to spin up new network resources in order to do their work, take advantage of new business opportunities, and focus on innovation. As the gatekeepers of the network, it’s up to the I&O team to facilitate these connections.
Because today’s businesses rely on their network like never before, the network needs to be available at all times to provide the connectivity required by remote workers, cloud applications, and automated systems. As the network has become critical to everyday operations, network troubleshooting has evolved from being a mundane task to one of the core functions of the Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) department.
