4. Transforming operations with AI Ops and cloud-based observability
The cloud was built on automation and has numerous programmatic interaction capabilities. Organizations can leverage these interaction capabilities to drive significant operations savings and value with the adoption of Artificial Intelligence Operations or AI Ops built around their cloud observable estate. AI Ops and observability have the potential to transform business operations through predictive and reactive workflow maintenance automation that proactively avoids system outages, improves system availability and reliability, and decreases an organization’s reliance on maintenance personnel.
In addition to AI Ops, organizations are also leveraging cloud native, custom and commercial tooling to automate their platform service/governance operations and software delivery pipelines. Some of these tools integrate with AI Ops platforms and/or are extended by them. These tools seek to automate governance, policy and procedure decision-making and help IT teams avoid, find and fix issues faster, as well as gain actionable insights, increase response time and make more informed decisions.
The ease and level of automation with which an organization’s internal IT staff operates its cloud directly impacts its cloud ROI. Employing cloud-connected managed services to accelerate, manage and operate cloud capabilities is another lever being employed to improve ROI. These managed services are increasingly being designed to focus on disciplines with high skill gaps like cybersecurity and consumer data regulatory compliance. Having a managed service pre-equipped with these and other hot skills can be a significant time savings.
Lastly, given the complexity of technology environments and the extreme number of endpoints, apps, compute, workload, data and interactions, it is more important than ever for automation solutions to run on large, observable data sets. Organizations are investing in observability of “the estate” to generate the data to allow both deeper predictability, cross-app data sharing and self-healing. Answering the collective question of “how do I know what is happening in my technology environment” is driving significant strategic change and ROI within the industry. Having the answer to the question can translate into resolving outages long before they are impactful.
5. Enabling green IT initiatives
As the market and company boards are increasingly focused on environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives, cloud attributed impacts to green IT are increasingly being tracked. Organizations are finding that cloud services can provide accretive benefits to carbon footprint reduction through means such as reduced e-waste, greener electrical consumption and more efficient water usage. All these sustainability factors add another layer to cloud ROI.
Another key ESG benefit of cloud services is its ability to help companies reduce their electricity usage. There is a one-to-one ratio when a company runs on the cloud, meaning there is zero wasted electricity. An Ernst & Young LLP client even reduced their energy consumption equivalent to 800 homes. Certain cloud providers can also help businesses be more transparent and track information such as their carbon footprint using cloud data exports that track direct and indirect emissions.