Using Analytics to Improve IT Operations and Services

Analytics technology is widely used to extract insights out of data to reveal sales patterns, understand customer preferences, measure business unit performance, tailor marketing strategies, and an endless number of other business-enhancing tasks.

Now, after years of supporting various enterprise analytics initiatives, a growing number of IT leaders are beginning to understand that analytics technologies can also be used to improve their own operations and services.

Analytics allows IT operations teams to combine structured and unstructured data to analyze, improve, or overhaul the quality of delivered IT services, said Bhanu Singh, senior vice president of engineering and DevOps at OpsRamp, which offers a service that helps IT teams discover, monitor, manage and automate hybrid environments. "It also helps IT teams understand critical operational trends and take decisions to optimize, remediate, and scale their services," he added.

Until recently, analytics was mostly used after the fact, with IT organizations relying on old data to predict future trends. "We didn't have adequate infrastructure, including compute power, for predictive or real-time analytics," Singh explained. "Now, modern systems can bring OLTP (online transactional processing) and OLAP (online analytical processing) together to drive real-time insights on operation health and business service effectiveness."

Read the rest of this article on InformationWeek.