How AI drives operational hygiene in IT operations

The stakes have never been higher for IT operations. With sprawling infrastructures, complex service dependencies, and escalating cybersecurity threats, it’s no wonder operational hygiene is front and center for IT leaders – with 30% stating that optimizing operations is a top-three-priority for the next two years.

IT leaders are already leaning on the power of AI solutions, but 75% feel they aren’t maximizing the potential of their tech investments. In fact, many organizations are still taking a reactive approach to operational hygiene, grappling with a tech stack that’s either failing to live up to its potential, or missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

So how can AI tools supercharge operational hygiene standards?

Join us as we explore how AI is helping organizations to shift their stance on operational hygiene from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention, where AIOps can deliver the most value, and the crucial role of process intelligence in continuous improvement.

Why is operational hygiene so important in IT?

Just like bodily hygiene is the foundation for good physical health, operational hygiene is the foundation for a resilient, healthy IT environment.

Done right, operational hygiene enables IT systems to run at their best, while remaining completely stable and secure. The integrity of your operational hygiene directly affects factors like reliability, efficiency, and your organization’s ability to scale (or innovate) without major disruption. Comprehensive, effective operational hygiene spans across:

• Data hygiene: ensuring the “cleanliness” of your data, including logs, metrics, and process data, by checking accuracy, as well as how complete and usable the data is.
• Cyber hygiene: taking precautions to maintain the health and security of your organization’s systems, including closed networks and individual devices.
• Configuration hygiene: preventing drift from approved configurations, to avoid breaching compliance and reduce the risks posed by unauthorized changes.
• Process hygiene: objectively monitoring and analyzing key IT processes through process mining.

From reactive to proactive – why AI operational hygiene is a game changer

The reactive mindset that historically dominated IT operations is over.

Responding after an incident takes place, with manual triage efforts and piles of alerts to filter through: these processes don’t work in the highly-distributed, cloud-native, and always-on infrastructure most enterprises are working with today. A reactive approach can give hygiene issues the wiggle room to slip through the cracks and escalate fast – causing costly disruptions.

AI is driving the shift from reactive to proactive, reshaping IT ops and empowering IT leaders to get ahead of incidents, outages, and failures in regulatory compliance, while increasing operational efficiency. Here are some of the most impactful ways AI supports proactive operational hygiene in IT:

1. Anomaly detection and early warning

AI can surface any behaviors or patterns that deviate from expected baselines, even before any alerts have sounded, enabling IT leaders to identify hidden hygiene risks (like latency creep) before they have an impact.

1. Noise reduction and smarter triage

The right AI tool can filter through the onslaught of alerts, spotting correlations, and prioritizing what matters so IT professionals can focus on addressing the most relevant and high-risk issues.

1. Predictive insights and automated diagnostics

With access to data from historical events and other system behavior, AI can anticipate incidents, capacity constraints, and compliance risks, while allowing poor operational hygiene to be addressed proactively.

1. AI-triggered remediation

In some cases, an AI solution can even trigger self-healing workflows when it detects an issue like an application or service failure, connectivity issues, or a resource threshold breach. By taking preemptive action (such as scaling resources or rebooting a service), automated remediation can correct issues before users (or dependencies) are impacted.

Despite AI’s transformative power, there’s a common missing link that stops these tools from fulfilling their potential (or generating a solid ROI). A massive 90% of IT leaders say that, to be effectively deployed, it’s crucial AI has the context of how their business runs. That’s where Celonis comes in.

The Celonis Context Model is the enabler for AI. It acts like a semantic layer, giving AI solutions the critical business context they need to go beyond low-hanging fruit, making smarter decisions, applying fixes, and driving real transformation.

• Learn more about the Celonis Context Model

High-impact use cases for AIOps

Now you know what it’s capable of, let’s take a look at some of the most impactful use cases for AI operational hygiene in IT.

• Accelerating root cause analysis

When incidents do occur, AIOps can reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). By connecting the dots between data sources, service dependencies, and historical incidents, AI surfaces the most relevant events, giving IT leaders a clear view of what went wrong and why. Not only does root cause analysis accelerate problem resolution – it also helps to prevent recurrence.

• Risk-scoring any upcoming change

No matter how many precautions you take, change in IT infrastructure remains one of the biggest triggers for IT incidents, and disruption to operational hygiene. AIOps helps to mitigate this risk by assessing upcoming software or systems changes before they go live, and delivering a risk score that helps IT teams make properly informed decisions about when and how to schedule change.

• Optimizing capacity planning and cost
  With AI-powered analytics, you can accurately forecast resource usage trends, equipping you to make data-driven calls about workloads and right-sizing, which result in a more cost, energy and time-efficient use of IT resources.
• Detecting compliance drift
  From manual, untracked changes to inconsistent deployment practices, there’s a whole host of reasons why your IT systems might drift from approved configurations. AIOps can continuously monitor systems and alert you to any discrepancies, flagging that drift and sometimes even auto-correcting before a compliance or security breach takes place.

• Want to find out more about AIOps? Take a look at our article ‘From automation to innovation: AI’s role in IT operations’.

Discover what Celonis does for Enterprise IT modernization and get in touch with our team to learn more about how Celonis can support operational hygiene in IT.