Sustaining Peak Performance with AIOps for Better Business Outcomes

Digitization programs in banks have strived for a ‘Peak Performance Zone’ that is characterized by optimal functioning, flow, and performance. In an already competitive financial services environment, dealing with the emerging realities of the post-pandemic world, the quality of digital experiences as a result of Peak Performance, may well be what distinguishes market leaders from the rest.

Banking IT architectures uniquely combine legacy systems, like mainframes and data centers, with new age digital technologies, like microservices, containers, hyperscalers, virtual machines, open-banking systems etc. Conventional Monitoring solutions adopted by enterprises tend to be siloed across banking application and infrastructure environments.  AIOps is now emerging as the lever for IT infrastructure and operations to provide end-to-end IT stack visibility, an absolute essential to enable the right business outcomes and sustain peak performance. AIOPs combine Big Data, Machine Learning and Analytics to provide actionable intelligence based on historical & real-time data to continuously transform infrastructure and operations.

According to Gartner, “There is no future of IT operations that does not include AIOps. This is due to the rapid growth in data volumes and pace of change (exemplified by rate of application delivery and event-driven business models) that cannot wait on humans to derive insights.”

A fundamental shift in approach to ITOps

AIOps enables a fundamental shift in approach – from a fault-driven ITOps practice to a more proactive practice that monitors and remediates anomalies.

A good AIOps platform can correlate and find patterns between selected, meaningful data elements and group them for further analysis. In other words, a strong platform enabled AIOps practice effectively correlates anomalies to business KPIs.

• Enabling Workforce Productivity – Automation to deal with repetitive tickets and resolutions allows the ITOps team to focus on the tasks of great strategic importance.
• Spending Right – Business value driven transformation initiatives, people development and skilling can grab a greater share of the IT budget. Banks can now focus on innovation by eliminating day-to-day drudge work required to “keep the lights on”
• Faster time-to-market – With a more agile infrastructure backbone, innovations can be delivered to customers faster.
• Superior Customer Experience – Greater uptimes, faster processes like customer onboarding, reduced order cycle times all contribute to a seamless customer experience
• Reduced MTTR – Quality AIOPs platforms can swiftly locate and identify faults. With quick root cause analysis, remediation measures ensure a faster MTTR
• Continuous Learning – AIOps delivers continuous Insights based on real-time and historical data. It retains data and insights from every event for future diagnosis, often averting crises in real-time.

Sustaining AIOps as a practice

While it is easy to be swayed by the lure of AIOps platforms and what they offer, it is important to ensure the adoption is sustainable as practice. AIOps needs to be trustable, scalable, strategic, personalized, and maintainable. A well-oiled AIOps engine is often tailored to the Bank’s specific peak performance outcomes, integrating seamlessly into DevSecOps and SRE practices. SRE and DevOps teams can continuously monitor IT stacks, identify anomalies, and predict events, and even initiate self-healing measures. Not to mention, the solution must work across key tools and technologies in the IT stack including Hyperscalers, data centers, integration platforms, databases, middleware, networks, security, and banking applications.

Additionally, the AIOps platform and the processes surrounding the intelligent infrastructure system must account for the new ideas of digital collaboration and hybrid workplaces. It is crucial that AIOps solutions are maintainable such that they require minimal maintenance and fine tuning. By automating the process, Intelligent Infra ensures that AIOps runs smoothly without any interference. When the AIOps solution is set up right, it enables a steady performance that isn’t subjected to a lot of fluctuations.

 PeakPerform^TM by SLK

At SLK, we’ve leveraged our very own AIOps platform – PeakPerform^TM to engineer transformation and empower Service Operations teams across Banks and other financial institutions. We have worked closely with IT teams in Banks to deliver on business KPIs by effectively combining PeakPerform^TM platform capabilities with our strengths

• Deep Banking and Financial Services domain experience in understanding Business Driven KPI’s & Processes
• Dedicated Center of Excellence for Intelligent infrastructure Services
• A consultative, product/tool-agnostic approach to solutioning
• Managed Service capabilities across Digital Infrastructure- Consulting and Design, Build & Provisioning, Migration and Modernization, Manage and Transform etc.

Authored By: Maruthi Prasad M S