Sameer Padhye, founder and CEO of FixStream, explains how AIOps just made migrating your data centre to the cloud a whole lot easier, whilst at the same time giving you an expanded view of your IT environment.

With measurable benefits such as cost reduction, faster provisioning, and redundancy, it’s no wonder more and more organisations are migrating IT resources from their local data centre to the cloud. Oftentimes, many enterprises don’t switch to an all-cloud environment, but rather retain a number of systems, applications and sensitive data in-house, resulting in a disparate, multi-layered, interconnected hybrid IT environment that is opaque, complex and ever-changing.

While this proliferation of assets and data architectures can enable new digital business models, it’s a challenge to support a sprawling hybrid IT environment generating thousands of transactions on a daily basis – especially with outdated monitoring tools that don’t work with each other or provide a clear status of IT resources. And if there’s a system error, IT teams can spend countless hours trying to analyse and repair the problem.

In short, moving your interconnected applications and data centre to the cloud can be a massive undertaking that requires careful preparation, starting with a complete listing of IT resources. Without an accurate updated inventory of assets, including containers and micro services, IT organisations can’t identify or understand the relationships or interdependencies between applications, infrastructure and other datasets. And without a precise understanding of the existing IT topology, it’s very difficult to execute a successful system upgrade or migration, whether on-premise or in the cloud. 

Expand your view with AIOps auto discovery

Fortunately, there are technology solutions to help an enterprise plan and track the progress of a cloud migration. For example, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), an AI-driven software platform that automates and accelerates IT tasks such as system monitoring, troubleshooting, and data analysis, uses auto discovery features to, among other things, identify all the assets and their status within a multi-domain IT ecosystem.

How does AIOps work?

Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, AIOps uses the volumes of log and performance data generated by systems, services and applications to identify all the components actually running in the system environment and the processes and dependencies associated with them.

The data is collected from all types of disparate entities, including servers, storage devices, virtual machines, and routers, whether physical, virtual or logical. AIOps can codify an entire hybrid IT ecosystem and highlight the interdependencies among IT entities, with zero blind spots.

Cloud migrations made easy

By collecting data across an enterprise’s IT environment, AIOps solutions can glean meaningful insights, such as service information and configuration data, from infrastructure and application entities across IT silos. They can also reveal the system dependencies you should consider when adding new applications and/or planning migrations to the cloud. This improved insight is invaluable for developing and executing a successful data centre migration plan.

Once AIOps has created a complete, accurate, real-time inventory of assets across the IT stacks, IT teams can use the information as the building blocks for efficient cloud migrations with minimum downtime. Also, by providing a real-time view into resource utilisation and workloads, AIOps can help organisations optimise cloud usage and ensure cost-effective results.

The visibility provided by AIOps can even help identify which system applications or components should be migrated to the cloud first, and if there are other parts that should be migrated at the same time. AIOps can determine the infrastructure footprint of an application, enabling you to create logical groups for migration, perform flow analysis, and visualise the business impact of migrating them.

More efficient system management

The AIOps platform can also facilitate patch and change management by forecasting the impact of updates to the system environment. Armed with insight from AIOps, you’ll be able to anticipate the effect of adding new applications or devices to your IT environment, so you can plan for future capacity needs and hardware/software updates.

This ability to foresee the potential effect of system changes will enable your team to successfully plan system additions and upgrades so they don’t affect business-critical applications. It also enables successful migrations, whether you are shifting on-premises applications to the cloud, upgrading or migrating to new on-premise technology, or dynamically managing resource allocations.

Bridging legacy and cloud infrastructures with AIOps

Some AIOps platforms can seamlessly integrate with on-premise and cloud computing services, enabling them to auto-detect issues and monitor all IT assets, even if they cross cloud and on-premise boundaries.

When IT departments struggle with limited insight into their distributed hybrid IT ecosystems, an AIOps platform can provide crystal-clear visibility of IT resources and their status, helping staff members better plan system migrations and pinpoint potential issues – before they hinder system performance.