devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Neeraj Deuskar

  • Cost Per IT Ticket: Think Beyond Opex in Your Cloud Journey

    Cost Per IT Ticket: Think Beyond Opex in Your Cloud Journey

     Globally, organizations have embraced cloud computing and delivery models for their numerous advantages. Gartner predicts  the public cloud market is expected to grow 21.4 percent by the end of 2018, from $153.5 billion in 2017. Cloud computing services provide an opportunity for organizations to consume specific services with delivery models that are most appropriate for them. They help increase the business velocity and reduce the capital expenditure by converting it into operating expenditure.

    Capex to Opex Structure

    Capital expenditure refers to the money spent in purchasing hardware and in building and managing in-house IT infrastructure. With cloud computing, it is easy to access the entire storage and network infrastructure from a data center without any in-house infrastructure requirements. Cloud service providers also offer the required hardware infrastructure and resource provisioning as per business requirements. Resources can be consumed according to the need of the hour. Cloud computing also offers flexibility and scalability as per business demands.

    All these factors help organizations move from a fixed cost structure for capital expenditure to a variable cost structure for the operating expenditure.

    Cost of Assets and IT Service Management

    After moving to a variable cost structure, organizations must look at the components of its cost structure. They include the cost of assets and the cost of service or cost of IT service management. Cost of assets show a considerable reduction after moving the entire infrastructure or assets to cloud. The cost of service remains vital as it depends on the day-to-day IT operations and represents the day-after-cloud scenario. The leverage of cloud computing can only be realized if the cost of IT service management is brought down.

    Growing ITSM or ITOPs Market and High Stakes

    While IT service management (ITSM) has taken a new avatar as IT operations management (ITOM), incident management remains the critical IT support process in every organization. The incident response market is expanding rapidly as more enterprises are moving to cloud every year. According to Markets and Markets, the incident response market is expected to grow to $33.76 billion by the year 2023 from $ 13.38 billion in 2018. The key factors that drive the incident response market are heavy financial losses post incident occurrence, rise in security breaches targeting enterprises and compliance requirements such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

    Service fallout or service degradation can impact key business operations. A survey conducted by ITIC indicates that 33 percent of enterprises reported that one hour of downtime could cost them $1 million to more than $5 million.

    Cost per IT Ticket: The Least Common Denominator of Cost of ITSM

    As organizations have high stakes in ensuring that business services run smooth, IT ops teams have additional responsibility in responding to incidents faster without compromising on the quality of service. The two important metrics for any incident management process are 1) cost per IT ticket and 2) mean time to resolution (MTTR). While cost per ticket impacts the overall operating expenditure, MTTR impacts customer satisfaction. The higher the MTTR, the more time it takes to resolve the tickets and, hence, the lower customer satisfaction.

    Cost per ticket is the total monthly operating expenditure of the IT ops team (IT service desk) divided by its monthly ticket volume. According to an HDI study, the average cost per service desk ticket in North America is $15.56. Cost per ticket increases as the ticket gets escalated and moves up the life cycle. For an L3 ticket, the average cost per ticket in North America is about $80-$100+.

    Severity vs. Volume of IT Tickets

    With our experience in managing the cloud IT ops for our clients, we understand that organizations normally look at the volume and severity of IT tickets. They target the High Severity and High Volume quadrants to reduce the cost of the tickets. However, with our experience, we strongly feel that organizations should start their journey with the low hanging fruits such as the Low Severity tickets, which are repeatable in nature and can be automated using bots.

    In the next blog, we will elaborate on this approach that can help organizations in measuring and reducing the cost of IT tickets.

    — Neeraj Deuskar

  • The Need for a Command Center in Managing Complex IT Operations

    The Need for a Command Center in Managing Complex IT Operations

    A few days ago, I was traveling from Bangalore to Mumbai. It was an overcast and wet morning so I started out early to avoid having to battle traffic and worry about the prospect of being delayed. At the airport, I checked in, went through the usual formalities and boarded the flight.  I was anticipating a delay, but to my surprise the flight was on time.

    While we were approaching the main runway, I could see many flights ahead of us in a queue, waiting for their turn to take off. At the same time, there were two planes that had landed within a couple of minutes of each other. The entire environment of the runway and the surroundings looked terribly busy. While our flight was preparing to take off, the air traffic control (ATC) tower grabbed my attention. That tall structure looked very calm in the midst of what seemed chaos, orchestrating every move of all the planes, making sure that the ground operations were smooth, error-free and efficient in difficult weather conditions.

    I started comparing the runway and airport ground operations with that of the complex IT environment in enterprises today, and the challenges it poses to the IT operations teams. Today, critical business services reside on complex IT infrastructure such as on-premises, cloud and hybrid cloud environments. These require security, scalability and continuous monitoring. But do they have the ATC or the command center that can orchestrate and monitor all the IT assets and infrastructure for its smooth functioning? For instance, if the payment service of an e-commerce service provider is down for few minutes, it would have to incur significant losses and impact overall business opportunities creating an adverse impact.

    Perhaps, today’s IT operations team needs one such command center, just like an ATC at the airport, so that they can fight downtime, eliminate irrelevant noise in operations and provide critical remediation. This command center should have the ability to provide a 360-degree view of the health of the IT infrastructure and availability of business services besides providing the topology view of dependent node structure. This could help in assessing the root cause analysis of a particular IT incident or event occurrence. The command center should also provide a complete view of all IT assets, aggregated alerts, outage history and past incident occurrence and related communication, enabling the IT team to predict the future occurrence of such events or incidents to prevent the outages of critical business services. In case these outages or incidents did occur, it would be a boon for the IT operations team if a command center could provide critical data-driven insights and suggest remedial actions, which in turn could be provisioned with proactive BOTs.

    I arrived at my destination on time, thanks to the ATC, which made it possible, despite the challenging and complex weather conditions. This brings me to a critical question that I need to ask: Do you have the required ATC or command center for IT operations to help you sustain, pre-empt and continue with business operations in a complex IT environment?

    — Neeraj Deuskar