AIOps: The Power to Transform IT Operations and enhance Cybersecurity

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous throughout all industries. It comprises a large umbrella of technologies such as machine learning (ML), natural language processing, intelligent automation, and more, that perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence. AI can be applied to virtually any organizational function to discover new insights and contexts from data, create abstractions that make work easier, and detect patterns and anomalies humans might miss. To be sure, AI is revolutionizing business.

One promising application of AI is to IT operations (ITOps), which is now commonly referred to as AIOps. Like many common IT terms, there is no single definition of AI Ops; we define it as:

Using Artificial Intelligence to enhance, streamline or automate IT Operations leveraging real-time first and third party data, machine learning, and cognitive technologies.

The “software-defined-everything” world leveraged by DevOps has created an immense advantage for those companies that have embraced it. However, as IT infrastructures increase in complexity, the ITOps team has a growing list of tasks they need to automate.

Adding to the challenges, newer technologies such as public clouds produce incredible amounts of data, and incredible amounts of noise. In fact, improving the signal-to-noise ratio in the vast array of data produced by information systems is one of the largest challenges in the modern IT environment.

Companies can employ AIOps technologies to meet those challenges and gain robust capabilities throughout all phases of ITOps. With a sound AIOps platform they can:

• Visualize and analyze vast data sets to gain deeper insights • Automate pattern discovery to detect anomalies and make faster data correlations to reduce noise • Perform more proactive, automated ITOps • Mitigate risks with analytics capabilities that augment and exceed human capabilities

The goal of AIOps is two-fold: to automate as much of ITOps as possible and provide quicker, deeper insights for business leaders based on the data received from ITOps.It has the potential to help companies transform their ITOps, especially in critical areas such as cybersecurity.

While the benefits of AIOps span all facets of IT, no area is drawing more interest in AIOps than cybersecurity. The cyber-threat landscape is ever-evolving, and the threats are becoming more severe and numerous. Just ask any health care, financial, or governmental organization that’s been hit with a ransomware attack or suffered a data breach.

AIOps is a great approach to tackling cybersecurity challenges. Traditional human, rules-based approaches are not adequate to solve security issues at speed, with competence. However, with AIOps, companies can manage the balance of finite resources—both human and monetary—needed to enforce cybersecurity.They can also meet the challenges associated with the scale of cybersecurity issues—e.g., data volumes, event velocities, etc.—that make it nearly impossible for human teams to separate true signals from noise, detect and prioritize all potential threats, and effectively prioritize vulnerability mitigation activities.