By Scott Kinane, Vice President of Worldwide Automation at Kyndryl
Business leaders are no strangers to competing priorities. Whether they’re focused on increasing revenues, improving customer satisfaction or capturing new market opportunities, their company’s IT operations must be dynamic and responsive to an ever-changing environment.
However, trying to achieve these goals while maintaining or reducing IT spending can limit opportunities for growth. It’s no surprise, then, that companies are investing more heavily in automation and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). In fact, a recent Kyndryl-IDC study found that even with overall IT budgets being maintained or reduced, companies plan to spend more on automation and AIOps over the next two years.
While over 70% of companies in the study said they would maintain or reduce overall IT spending in the next two years, 63% of these same companies said they would increase their automation spending, specifically. And for the most part, they planned to increase automation spending by at least 10% to 20%.
3 reasons companies are focusing on automation
Benefits of automation in business
Kyndryl’s Advanced Delivery approach is designed to help our clients meet these goals. Advanced Delivery enables our clients to be automated, orchestrated and intelligent. It combines our key technologies, Kyndryl Bridge and Intelligent Automation, with dedicated and focused delivery teams that integrate with our customer’s application teams.
This two-pronged approach of technology and people-based support gets the most out of knowledge already embedded in the massive scale of operations and maintains our intimate customer connections. Today, we manage millions of applications and IT components, many exabytes of storage, perform tens of millions of automated Day 0, 1, and 2 operations every month, and much more. Operating at this scale provides the learnings that feed critical information into our AIOps technology, giving us the insights needed to automatically take necessary actions.
We want to be proactive — ideally, we want to “fix it before it breaks.” The advanced capabilities of Kyndryl Bridge can help pinpoint and anticipate what and where incidents will happen in an IT environment and do what’s necessary to take preventive actions. Since its launch last September, early customers of Kyndryl Bridge have already achieved up to 75% reduction in incident volume.
Additionally, our experience shows us that end-of-life and end-of-service devices in an IT estate are risky and often big contributors to problems in IT environments. Kyndryl Bridge AIOps technology provides real-time reporting and forecasting for hardware and software approaching end-of-life. This proactive identification supports better capital allocation, prioritizes cloud migration projects and identifies investment targets for additional resiliency expenses.
Another at-risk area in IT is “best practice” alignment. Microsoft, VMWare, SAP and others constantly publish new best practice configurations for their hardware, operating systems and software. With additional challenges like security and compliance recommendations from organizations such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS), it can be overwhelming to keep up with the latest changes.
Drifting from these configurations happens over time. So, our objective is to keep a best practices alignment of 90% or better. We use policy-based automation technology to ensure that deviations from these settings are automatically fixed when detected.
Kyndryl has a simple goal: ensure at least 95% of the interactions with an IT environment are driven through automation. Whether it’s use cases like fulfilling a service request, implementing a change or responding to an incident, or automatically initiating resiliency protocols when seismic events happen — we believe our automation can deliver the best outcome.
Finding the right automation partner
Only 20% of companies identify themselves as “mature” in automation, according to recent studies. Within this group, 70% indicated they could not achieve that status without a third party. Partnership is the most important factor for success — providing implementation and additional managed services for automation after implementation.
That’s where Kyndryl excels. Kyndryl’s Advanced Delivery with automation and Kyndryl Bridge AIOps technology can proactively identify issues, automatically fix problems and implement policy-based guardrails that ensure your critical IT and application environment.
We know things happen. When they do, we are prepared to quickly offer quality responses, which is critical. It can be the difference between a transitory and momentary blip in service or a business disaster that puts customers in the news for the wrong reasons.
