Keeping IT teams resilient by reducing complexity

New tools bring new opportunities — more speed, scale and innovation — but they also bring new challenges. Does this sound familiar? That’s the everyday reality of modern IT teams: they’re tasked with keeping the lights on and systems running smoothly, as well as adapting to an environment where technology stacks grow increasingly layered, dynamic, and difficult to manage by the day.

A recent report from Enterprise Strategy Group offers insight into how organisations are navigating the evolving landscape. The findings? There’s a lot to unpack — and more to improve.

The puzzle of modern IT complexity

Hybrid cloud environments, diverse deployment models and continuous delivery practices have made modern IT operations increasingly complex. These innovations offer scalability, flexibility and speed, but also flood teams with significant challenges, competing priorities and constant change.

Architectural diversity, API sprawl and fragmented tooling make it difficult for IT teams to see what matters most, let alone act on it. And here’s a surprising statistic: the average organisation uses 11 different monitoring tools, a vast number of dashboards, alerts and silos. It’s not surprising that 52% of organisations still lack full-stack observability. Instead of giving teams a clear view of their systems, this ‘tool sprawl’ creates fragmentation.

Transforming operational resilience

To stay resilient, IT operations must be closely aligned with business goals, for clear visibility about what needs attention first. Achieving this level of alignment and clarity demands a cohesive strategy. The report outlines a three-pronged approach designed to cut through complexity and deliver meaningful impact.

1. A unified observability approach

By centralising and contextualising data streams — like logs, metrics, events and alerts — into a single platform, organisations can cut through the noise. Correlating and de-duplicating alerts improves incident response times for a single source of truth and a clearer picture of system health, aligning IT more closely with business goals.

This unified approach to observability replaces fragmented views with a cohesive operational lens, making it easier for teams to detect, diagnose and resolve issues quickly. Instead of toggling between disconnected tools, IT teams gain real-time, actionable insights in one place, accelerating root cause analysis and reducing downtime. Ultimately, it’s about making complexity manageable and turning data into decisive action.

2. Integrating observability with IT service management

Integrating observability platforms with IT service management (ITSM) is a key step in enhancing operational resilience. This system integration enables the automatic creation of incident tickets with the necessary context, building on the foundation of unified observability.

By streamlining the incident response process, organisations can respond more effectively to issues and minimise downtime: this reduces noise and accelerates mean time to resolution, aligning incident response with service-level agreements and other business-relevant metrics, fostering cross-team collaboration and a proactive AIOps paradigm.

For instance, when an alert is triggered, the ITSM system can automatically generate a ticket with detailed information and assign it to the appropriate team to promptly act. This automation enhances the accuracy and efficiency of incident management, meaning businesses can have more proactive IT operations and improve operational resilience.

3. Utilise AI-driven automation and insights

To transform raw data into actionable insights, GenAI can aid in the process. Through continuous analysis and contextualisation of telemetry data, GenAI identifies early warning signs of severe incidents while providing best practices for timely remediation.

This supports teams in gaining insights through plain-language queries and generating tailored reports and dashboards — meaning businesses can optimise their infrastructure with cost and efficiency. For example, potential issues can be predicted before they become critical, allowing teams to take preventive measures and avoid downtime. Automating remediation workflows and operational processes lets the business shift its focus more onto strategic and innovation-oriented tasks.

Align operational resilience and business goals

Following this three-pronged approach, organisations can better recover from, withstand and adapt to disruptions. This allows IT investments to deliver aligned, measurable and impactful business results with reduced downtime.

Implementing this foundation also supports businesses with continuous improvement by fostering a proactive and data-driven decision-making culture. With an IT infrastructure that’s robust, responsive and closely aligned with business objectives, organisations can quickly adapt to changing requirements and evolving environments.

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