Currently, data center outsourcing (DCO) providers spend 70% to 80% of their IT budget on operations and maintenance of data centers. However, clients increasingly expect year-over-year improvements in service quality and performance, coupled with multiyear price reductions. These market conditions
- Force DCO service providers to focus intently on service delivery effectiveness to address rising customer expectations regarding service quality and reliability.
- Call for improvements of operational efficiency.
- Require a shift in spending from keeping the lights on to optimization efforts.
The drive to deliver against these demands requires providers to adopt an increasing amount of automation in the data center. But providers struggle to know which areas to focus on and how much they should aim to automate each area.
Gartner research has identified a focused approach to automation, which providers can adopt within their infrastructure operations to deploy intelligent automation services (IAS) to stay competitive. For example, our research found out that the average time to manually resolve a web server outage event is around 14 minutes. While an IAS solves the same issue in six minutes — 2.3 times faster.
IAS has an immediate effect on agility and speed as well since it
- Can perform multiple functions at the same time
- Has access to all the needed information immediately
- Works at consistent quality levels
Some DCO providers told us that they already can resolve more than 400 incidents automatically via a self-healing mechanism of their implemented IAS.
Intelligent automation is immediately imperative for success in data center outsourcing and will determine who the winners are in the future.
To learn more and identify operational areas to apply intelligent automation read the full research note “How to Invest in Intelligent Automation as a Data Center Outsourcing Provider”. (paywall)
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