41% of CIOs have IT cost reduction on their agenda, with targets to cut cost by up to 30-40%.
~ PwC and Strategy & COVID-19 CIO Pulse Survey
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a widespread impact on the global economy, CIOs are focusing their attention on prudent IT cost management.
Chris Ganly, a senior director analyst at Gartner, says, “ COVID-19 has fundamentally transformed the way people are spending their money, and organizations simply have to respond. Gartner advocates a strategic cost optimization approach, which is a continuous discipline to managing spending while maximizing business value, rather than simply cutting costs. ”
With the COVID-19 pandemic changing the way businesses operate, IT has quickly moved on from being a siloed cost center to a strategic enabler of business survival and growth. Therefore, IT costs have become a significant component of an organization’s budget. Hence, CIOs must invest strategically in IT to survive the tough times and build a resilient, future-proof workplace for the times to come.
CIOs need to approach cost-cutting in a manner that has a minimum adverse impact on the business’ medium-term and long-term health. While introducing cost reduction measures within the organization, CIOs must focus on three aspects –
- Understanding the full range of potential options for reducing costs
- Taking cognizance of the built-in flexibility in IT spending
- Focusing on the present while preparing for a new normal in the post-COVID world
Such measures can ensure business continuity and help CIOs redirect funds into investments to accommodate new business priorities.
Here are the three ways we are helping CIOs reduce IT operations costs by 30% in 2021.
How can CIOs reduce IT operations cost by 30% in 2021?
1. Azure cost optimization
Cloud cost optimization has become a top-rated priority for CIOs, particularly in the COVID-19 pandemic. As more organizations move their resources to the cloud to reap benefits such as increased flexibility and unparalleled scalability, CIOs mustn’t lose sight of the associated costs. CIOs must ensure costs do not spiral beyond the budget to maximize ROI, reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), and leverage cloud services in the best possible manner.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we at Acuvate offer an AI-driven Azure Cost Optimization (ACO) solution designed to help CIOs better optimize their Azure spending, increase predictability, monitor usage, and detect anomalies related to costs.
According to Gartner, 70% of cloud spend is wasted each year due to poor architecture and unprovisioned resources. The best ways to optimize these costs include – (i) identifying unused resources, (ii) finding the right resource size, (iii) consolidating idle resources, and a host of other measures.
ACO delivers the most actionable optimization recommendations, with key features that include –
- AI-enabled cost anomaly detection
- Proactive cost optimization
- Data insights on forecast and budget
- Service analysis and provisioning
- Robot to take action on recommendations
- Governance, admin control, security, and compliance
Our ACO solution includes interactive dashboards that help CIOs gain faster insight into key metrics, including anomalies, potential cost savings, idle resources, etc.
2. Cost reduction through AIOps
Businesses are rapidly moving online, and when the IT team is overwhelmed with rolling out new digital services and apps and keeping existing infrastructure up and performing, CIOs must look at ways to free up capital and people’s time for more productive work.
As a result, CIOs are evaluating AIOps to optimize costs while remediating some of the biggest IT challenges. AIOps, or artificial intelligence in IT Operations, leverages machine learning and data analytics to enable faster, simpler, and efficient IT operations management at scale. Besides saving millions of dollars in lost revenue due to a potential disruption in IT services, AIOps reduces running IT costs by automating and standardizing day-to-day IT operations, including –
- Application performance monitoring to maximize uptime
- Predictive analytics to understand which IT incidents can potentially cause network outages
- Root-cause analysis involving the correlation of events and anomalies so the IT team can troubleshoot and diagnose issues more quickly
- Automating mundane tasks, such as resetting passwords, solving routine queries, completing logs, etc.
At Acuvate, we help clients optimize IT operations through the deployment of AIOps. Key components of the service include –
- Intelligent alerts and incident reporting
- Service desk automation
- Anomaly detection
- Root cause analysis automation
- Predictive insights and information
- Baselining of performance
- Reduction in event noise
3. Virtual Assistants
When IT service desk agents are immersed neck-deep in trying to solve routine issues, maintaining thousands of tickets, and managing service requests, projects that add value to the business, unfortunately, take a back-seat.
Since the IT service department handles many routine, repetitive tasks, CIOs are looking at automating these mundane tasks to help save enormous costs without compromising on the quality of service.
At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy virtual assistants to provide convenient, smart, 24X7 IT support at scale with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. Being a low-code platform, BotCore accelerates the speed at which enterprises can build and deploy AI-enabled virtual assistants. Virtual assistants use AI, ML, and NLP to remediate day-to-day issues, automate mundane service requests, answer FAQs, and provide intelligent suggestions based on a user’s role, location, duties, etc.
Some of the capabilities of our virtual assistants are –
- L0 support
- L1 & L2 agent handover
- Knowledge database
- Service delivery task automation
- Triage requests
Getting Started
The biggest paradox CIOs face is reducing IT costs while improving IT infrastructure and investing in capabilities that build agility to prepare the organization for future sustenance and growth. And with the increasing dependence on digital, embracing technologies like AI and cloud services is on every CIO’s radar to optimize costs.
As seen above, our AI-driven managed services (AiDMS), including AIOps, Azure cost optimization, and virtual assistants, help monitor and strengthen the IT infrastructure, improve support desk efficiency, enhance application performance, build resiliency, and save costs.
To learn more about our AiDMS, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our AiDMS experts.
