IT Operations Management Trends 2016

Interesting factoids from the world of IT Operations Management in 2016, from the experts.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages, the single most frequent root cause of data outages continues to be uninterrupted power supply (UPS) system failure.  However, while most root causes hover close to their year-over-year averages, cyber crime distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are the fastest-growing threat vector for outages.  This indicates a closer partnership between operations and information security is warranted, including the coordinated management of key edge devices.  While IT equipment failure is essentially the lowest root cause for data center outages, the report also indicates it's the most expensive outage type to overcome.

Where the Money Goes

Costs are composed of three primary sources, as defined in the Ponemon report: indirect costs (without direct cash outlay), direct costs (requiring cash outlay), and opportunity costs (lost business).  Over half of each dollar is in indirect costs - those often-invisibile costs that sap organizational resources and negatively impact overall enterprise output without cost reimbursement.

Cloud, Anyone?

The RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report indicates a new top challenge in the cloud space – lack of resources and technical expertise to meet the growing demand for cloud services.  Security fell to second place, showing that data protection remains a key user as well as resource need, especially in the face of increasing cyber attacks.  Managing multiple cloud services is also a growing challenge – the report further indicates that users access on average 6 private clouds on a regular basis.

Gartner Group: The Future of IT Operations Management is AIOps

According to the Gartner Group, IT Operations Management (ITOM) is evolving because the environment itself is evolving, and new technologies are providing cheaper, more modular IT components.  As traditional operational silos become thinner and work specialization transcends a single domain, companies seeking to maximize ITOM effectiveness are migrating toward data-centric management models and exploring machine learning alternatives for event management, correlation, and escalation.  Gartner calls this approach “Algorithmic IT Operations” (AIOps).