Daunting. It’s one of the first words that comes to mind for IT and business leaders tackling the challenges of 2023 and looking to future-proof their organizations. IT operations (ITOps) departments are working to balance priorities during a time of growing uncertainty and pressure. ITOps is the team that keeps the lights on, and today, it must do so with enough speed to meet business demands.

The life of an L1 engineer … receiving all the tickets, providing all the IT services, and interacting with all the stakeholders. Tickets, like requests for access to an application or system, account unlocks, onboarding and offboarding employees, and more are here to stay.

A leading provider of advanced network communications and technology solutions for consumers, small businesses, enterprise organizations, and carrier partners across the U.S. wanted to become more powerful, using automation, as to better understand the customer impact of bad weather and proactively improve their customer experience.

All business eyes seem to be focused on the current challenges of an unsteady economic environment, and organizational leaders are working to figure out the best plan to overcome them. Leaders have their own collection of key initiatives as no two companies are the same. Most commonly; however, they want to double capacity and productivity, cut costs, enhance customer experiences, and future-proof their organizations.

President Casey Murray of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association in February 2023 made it very clear that the airline’s outdated technology had failed miserably during the winter storm of 2022. And that the IT and “infrastructure from the 1990s” allowed the wild weather to destroy travel plans for thousands of Southwest passengers, keeping them from spending the holidays with family, friends, and loved ones.

Are business outcomes, with the potential to make or break an organization’s future, becoming more important than they’ve ever been before? It sure seems that way. Embarking on the journey of business growth despite a treacherous path of challenges, all departments are biting at the bit for stability, solid strategies, and a reliable plan for what’s ahead.

The more people realize the many ways automation makes their jobs easier, the more they want to apply it – and not just in IT, but across business departments and for multiple processes. By 2025, Gartner predicts: IT individuals have been taking advantage of automation for at least 10 years, but as the stats show, organizations as a whole are gravitating toward the value automation can bring.

User expectations — those of employees and customers alike — are turning up the heat for businesses and their IT departments. Could the demand for nonstop, fast, and basically flawless digital services be any higher?

Organizations lean on IT as the foundational force for helping the business succeed, even more so when stakes are high, and the future is unpredictable. Considering the countless tasks and processes carried out in IT, automation is no longer a nice to have. It’s a requirement for starting, and maintaining, a system of consistency that supports the business through instability and uncertainty.

A leading mobile communications company, based in South Africa, had big plans for its growth in the upcoming months. To ensure customer loyalty as they continued to grow their subscribers, they had to make sure their networks evolved while maintaining performance. That meant the organization’s IT and network teams needed a way to support business goals for growth with their existing capacity.