According to Gartner, enterprise usage of AIOps is set to surge from a mere 5% in 2018 to a whopping 30% in 2023. To survive in an increasingly competitive market, MSPs must not only respond well to customer expectations but anticipate them.
Another Gartner report states that by 2025, over 80% of public cloud managed and professional services deals will require both hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities from the provider, up from below 50% in 2020. AIOps enables a more agile and observable environment, paving the way forward for an MSP shifting from reactive to proactive IT.
Before looking at the various benefits AIOps tools and observability data unlock for MSPs, let’s look at their status quo and the pressing challenges MSPs face in the modern, post-COVID era.
The State of Managed Services Today
According to Grand View Research, the global managed services market was valued at USD 215.14 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 12.7% from 2021 to 2028. Almost 55% of businesses today prefer managed services partnerships to opt for value-added services and reduce security risks, which have multiplied since the pandemic outbreak due to remote work and the undeniable importance of electronic communication.
In the longer term, the integrated characteristics of managed services partnerships offer an alluring strategic benefit to businesses in the form of cost reduction associated with critical processes.
Cloud migration prompted many businesses through and post-pandemic to renew contracts with MSPs to support efficient remote work and business continuity. Moreover, businesses are emphasizing the use of cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning and augmented reality to improve customer experience as well as internal operations. Many count on MSPs to deliver effective functionalities cost-effectively, with the promise of high quality.
Challenges Modern MSPs Face Today
There’s a compelling opportunity for MSPs to deliver the customer experience, availability and consistent performance their clients demand. However, the path is lined with difficulties.
For customer-facing employees in departments across networks, systems, IT and monitoring, uptime and mean time to repair (MTTR) are critical metrics. For these areas of an MSP business, the focus lies on responding to customer issues, addressing help desk tickets, and break-fixing efficiently and quickly.
Individuals in MSPs higher in the hierarchy like service delivery managers and directors focus intensely on the customer experience, which typically includes a smooth customer onboarding process and effective management of escalations and issues that may disrupt the CX.
Apart from that, an MSP struggles with:
- A complex IT infrastructure across many customers.
- Obstructed clarity and insight across multiple environments.
- Prioritization and escalation of alert noise from a growing volume of clients.
- Tool or platform sprawl as a consequence of evolving customer needs.
- Making sense of the massive data volume in the modern IT infrastructure.
- Safeguarding self and customers from the increasing scale and intensity of cyberattacks.
How AIOps Strategy and Adoption Benefits MSPs
All those trends in mind, here are the key strategic benefits AIOps offers for MSPs:
- Observability integrated with AIOps helps address the ‘why’ behind MELT incidents and enables the offensive play with software. As development teams of the MSP customers face continued pressure to ship functionalities, observability can make operations more seamless by offering one-stop capture, visualization and analysis of MELTs for holistic insight into operations. Insights gathered from answering the ‘why’ behind events can lead to answers we don’t know to ask upfront. Ultimately, observability data facilitates a connected view of all performance data in real-time.
- With AIOps and Open Telemetry, MSPs that often support customers with a mix of tools, applications, systems and processes across on-prem and hybrid-cloud infrastructures can onboard and achieve value quickly by ingesting events directly from disparate apps and leveraging automated noise reduction, deduplication, context enrichment, event correlation, incident resolution and predictive analytics. These advancements also help MSPs achieve scalability and agility to manage an increased infrastructure footprint.
- Unification – AIOps enables Bring Your Own Tool (BYOT) and unifies all disparate data sources with integration. Consequently, MSPs can serve a range of customers even as they keep internal training costs in check. By working on the same AIOps layer, employees achieve faster time to value and deliver a sophisticated customer experience.
- A Differentiated Service Catalog for an exceptional customer experience is key for MSPs. AIOps can enable differentiated services such as predictive analytics to impart you the competitive edge you need over peers. AIOps will automate the analysis of relevant data and reference points, leading to insights into issues before they flare up. Numerous other value-added services are possible with AIOps for MSPs.
When data fabric technologies such as Robotic Data Automation Fabric is integrated with AIOps, enterprises have demonstrated improvement in TCO by over 50%, productivity surge of over 40% and MTTR optimized by over 60% as a result of self-service, no-code, in-place analytics.
With CloudFabrix, you can leverage a hosted/SaaS solution offering observability pipelines, unified alert/event intelligence, root cause automation and cost optimization services enabling MSPs to function in the high growth and accelerated business world of today.
Drop us a line to learn more about CloudFabrix for Managed Services Providers.
