Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Financial services companies enable a steady stream of intricate transactions—all of which are underpinned by an increasingly complex array of systems, services, and applications. Many forward-looking financial institutions have evolved to include multiple clouds, hyper-converged infrastructures, virtual machines, and containers to house massive quantities of transactional data and processes.

Financial services firms face a multitude of complex IT challenges. Banking is a 24×7 affair, and firms must ensure their infrastructure is “always on” — consistently running at the highest efficiency and reliability. Banking customers also expect frictionless experiences across mobile and digital banking services. Slow application response times and service outages are simply not an option. Commercial banking is also competitive.

ServiceOps is a technology-enabled approach that unifies IT operations and IT service management (ITSM) teams to improve incident management. In a recent survey of more than 400 global IT leaders by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 96% of respondents reported positive results from implementing the approach. Adoption rates are high: 75% have either an active effort or a formal initiative to streamline collaboration between ITSM and ITOps teams.

ScienceLogic, a leader in automated IT infrastructure monitoring and AIOps, has won the “Best AIOps Platform” award in the seventh annual AI Breakthrough Awards! Run by Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for today’s most competitive global technology markets, the awards highlight some of the world’s most innovative artificial intelligence (AI) companies, technologies, and products.

Achieving ZeroSec observability has long been the ultimate goal, yet it remains elusive despite countless hours and sleepless nights dedicated to the cause. A recent discussion with a client underscored the persistent challenges that many organizations continue to struggle with in this pursuit. They had all the right tools in place yet faced significant issues that prevented them from achieving a smooth run of the applications.

The complexity of modern IT environments and the volume of data they produce have increased by orders of magnitude. According to predictions from UBS, the data universe will grow by more than a factor of 10 — reaching 660 zettabytes — from 2020 to 2030. This explosive growth exceeds the abilities of legacy event-management tools and human operators. AIOps augments human activities within IT operations using AI, data, and machine learning.

IT operations teams in the financial services industry face serious challenges. Customers expect a seamless experience across a complex landscape including online platforms, mobile devices, and ATMs. Competition is fierce. Technology evolution continually disrupts the marketplace. These factors create obstacles for the teams tasked with ensuring near-perfect service availability while continuing to innovate.

The ability to quickly and accurately identify the root cause of IT incidents is paramount. According to EMA Research, more than 80% of IT professionals said a solution that could generate an accurate summary of alerts and incidents, including the likely root cause, would be transformational or high value. Respondents noted that such a solution would reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 10 to 30 minutes.

Each year, financial services organizations handle billions of transactions, through which trillions of dollars of commerce flow. Customers expect key services, from online banking and cash transfers to payroll services, to be available around the clock, just as they expect their assets, data, and identities to be kept secure. Meanwhile, financial institutions themselves must be able to maintain ongoing communication with clearing houses, stock markets, payment processors, and other relevant parties.