Day in and day out, hour after hour, they are tending to fires and other threats to livelihoods, property, and infrastructure. Diligent and often putting their personal lives in a far second-place position, they keep people safe and regularly prevent untold thousands—even millions—of dollars in damage.
Thank goodness for those dedicated IT professionals in so many organizations.
Perhaps you thought we were speaking of firefighters or other kinds of first responders? They are to be honored and are inherently important, but in business after business, the IT staff—whether it’s one person or many—stands against disaster just as stolidly. Granted, with much less threat to life and limb.
Imagine, though, what harm could be done to your business and your customers if you didn’t have an IT team to prevent or douse the many fires that erupt regularly, threatening efficiency, capacity, security, and more.
Imagine how much more your IT staff could do to fend off disaster with better tools in their possession, tools like predictive AI capabilities that integrate directly into your data management solution.
Put out fires faster and more efficiently
Much like firefighters spend days at a time living at the station, being on-call 24/7, your IT professionals spend long days and sometimes late nights at the office ensuring that you have the capacity to function at peak performance and meet both company and customer needs. With remote access, they may also spend hours at home responding to changes in capacity and utilization and dealing with threats to performance and security.
Predictive AI that assists in capacity planning and performance forecasting makes it easier for IT to respond to the metaphorical fires that break out. It means fewer fire drills that need to be carried out in preparation for unseen threats, and it helps reduce the number of false alarms to which they must respond.
Predicting where the fires will erupt
Better capacity planning and performance forecasting also means that IT can more effectively anticipate where and when fires are most likely to break out and pinpoint the potential area of worst damage, resulting more frequently in the avoidance of possible conflagrations.
Parameters can be adjusted, storage and other resources reallocated more efficiently, so crises don’t arise as often—or at all.
When a problem does arise, the IT team can react more quickly and efficiently to put it to rest and keep operations running smoothly. Worst case? They can restore systems and processes faster, should they be interrupted or completely go down.
Thus, IT becomes more effective and spends less time on-call. No company should want its IT professionals devoting most of their lives to fighting fires or responding to threats, not to mention that those employees need to maintain a quality of life away from work.
Creating fire breaks and adding value
The final benefit of using predictive analytics that is integrated seamlessly into your storage and other infrastructure is that it benefits your business across all functions.
For one thing, IT can set up processes that will help create “fire breaks,” making it less likely that any crisis will spread throughout the company and shut it down. Your team cannot only predict where fires are most likely to occur but also ensure that they do not spread if they happen—your data is protected and can be restored quickly if compromised.
Moreover, the IT team will have more time to teach people throughout the organization how to help prevent and promptly extinguish “fires.” They become not just a group of firefighters but educators as well.
Ultimately with fewer blazes and alarms to respond to, IT can devote more time to improving the greater infrastructure. They become yet another team that actually adds value to the bottom line and makes the operation more efficient and profitable.
The tools you need to succeed
That is what Tintri’s predictive analytic tools do for you; they provide more than just a storage solution. You get data management that allows for prevention and restoration due to the ability to take deep dives into your virtual machines (VMs). With a few clicks, you can find out what they are doing and where improvements can be implemented.
A strong predictive analytics tool enables you to better examine past data and apply it to future plans and goals. That saves time and makes it easier for you to consistently succeed in your capacity planning, but it’s also a step toward an even larger goal.
Yes, managing your resources in the IT infrastructure is critical to smooth operations within the organization and facilitation of the customer experience. It also affects any business-to-business functions you might need to carry out. However, if you lean into predictive analytics, you can move beyond just capacity planning and into performance forecasting that can take the business into much higher levels of success and profitability.
AI-powered predictive analytics can help gather your data into more digestible and easily accessed formats, giving you a clear picture of where the company has been, where it is, and where it could go. That far surpasses common resource management. On the IT side, teams can pivot faster because they can operate with more actionable data and less guesswork. Then, they can pass insights to their executive team more rapidly and with more certainty to fuel bigger-picture business decisions.
Most analytics tools available don’t provide what companies truly need, due to the fact they are focused on support: they are primarily designed to predict hardware failures and facilitate the support process. Such tools offer limited data, collecting it at the LUN or volume level but unable to correlate that to the VM and application. You can see what’s happening inside your storage, but you can’t map it to your VMs and applications.
Tintri Analytics takes a different approach, having been designed from the ground up to support resource planning and provide the critical link between storage metrics, VMs, and applications. Furthermore, you can create “what-if” scenarios to assess the impact of changes before they are implemented. This helps understand the consequences of potential changes to your enterprise cloud, and you can do so as far as 18 months in advance.
Evolve IT into not just better firefighters and crisis managers but your organization’s first line of defense, skillfully averting crises before they happen. Give these employees the power to benefit the company at a higher level. It will only enhance operations and produce a team that feels exceptionally valued.
Experience the power of predictive analytics. Experience Tintri!
