The managed service provider (MSP) model delivers tremendous value for clients. They benefit from expertise and implementation that would be difficult and cost-prohibitive to build and manage themselves. The MSPs take on those responsibilities, which means they are on the hook for delivering the services to their clients in an effective and efficient manner. SLAs are used to ensure that MSPs uphold their end of the bargain, and consistently meeting those SLAs is critical for customer satisfaction and retention. But MSPs can’t meet SLAs at any cost—after all, they are also businesses that must operate profitably.
As an MSP, you need to achieve a delicate balance of service quality, responsiveness, and cost-effectiveness, which can be challenging. AIOps can help you optimize resource allocation to meet customer demands faster and more effectively. More specifically, AIOps can help you:
- Prevent SLA-killers, which cost money, directly through financial penalties and indirectly through lost customers.
- Increase operational efficiency, which can strengthen margins and profitability.
- Make better decisions, which can drive improvements in all areas of your business.
Here are six ways AIOps can deliver these benefits and be a game changer for MSPs.
Prevent SLA-killers
1. Proactive issue identification and resolution
Problems don’t usually strike out of the blue—there’s often a condition or set of conditions that, left unchecked, ultimately lead to an SLA-impacting issue. Even if—especially if—that all happens within a short time frame, you want to be able to spot those problems before they affect your clients. AIOps with machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics allow you to anticipate potential problems and address them preemptively so you maintain consistently high service availability and reliability.
2. Predictive maintenance
Hardware failures can create downtime that’s costly both for your clients and your reputation. Unfortunately, such outages can happen even with the most rigorous planned maintenance strategies in place. Using AIOps, you can analyze historical data to identify patterns that demonstrate performance degradation or indicate potential pending hardware failures. This enables you to proactively perform needed maintenance or replacement activities outside of regularly scheduled windows to prevent unplanned downtime.
Increase operational efficiency
3. Automated operations
The more you and your team can accomplish the same things with less time, effort, and resources required, the more efficient you can be. And accomplishing more with less, trite as that saying may be, opens up additional options for your business—such as taking on more clients or reallocating resources more strategically. AIOps enables you to automate routine and repetitive tasks and processes such as monitoring, alerting, and remediation, so you can streamline workflows and reduce manual efforts.
4. Enhanced security posture
No matter what kind of IT services you manage for your clients, security is paramount. AI-driven security analytics to monitor network traffic, analyze user behavior, and detect anomalous activities enables you to proactively identify and address potential breaches or compliance violations before they become full-blown incidents.
Make better business decisions
5. Optimized resource allocation
Running your business responsibly requires you to balance investments in resources with client needs. Overprovisioning your environment is safe from a client SLA perspective but a waste of money, while underprovisioning keeps costs low but puts your SLAs at risk. Finding that rightsized balance, however, can be easier said than done. AIOps enables you to analyze workload patterns, performance metrics, and utilization trends to select the optimal resources at the best cost to meet evolving business demands.
6. Data-driven insights and reporting
AIOps generates actionable insights and reports based on continual analysis of vast amounts of IT operations data, performance metrics, and SLAs that you can use throughout your business. For example, on the client side, you can use the outputs to demonstrate the value of the services you deliver and provide transparency. Operationally, you can use the insights to drive continuous service delivery and performance improvements.
Differentiate yourself in a crowded market
MSPs can leverage the power of AIOps to deliver more proactive, efficient, and reliable managed services that support business outcomes for their clients—and their own businesses. With so many game-changing use cases for AIOps, MSPs have the opportunity to build stronger client relationships, enhance their reputation in the industry, and stay ahead of the competition.
Virtana: The AIOps choice for MSPs
The Virtana Platform delivers AI-powered AIOps monitoring for full-stack visibility that delivers actionable insights into application health, migration, performance, multi-cloud cost management, and monitoring. We work with many MSPs and have built in the multitenant capabilities and billing features you need to support your business requirements. Request a trial
Meeta Lalwani
