SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI), a leading provider of easy, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, has revealed its forecasts for the year ahead’s IT trends and themes. To satisfy their efficiency, service delivery, and productivity goals, businesses are likely to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation even more this year.
As digital environments have become more modern and mature with the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, they’ve also become infinitely more complex to migrate, monitor, and manage. With constrained resources, limited time, and mounting workloads, IT teams have embraced AI-powered automation to provide a critical lift.
“As AI becomes more sophisticated and its application more widespread—from consumer uses like ChatGPT to impactful enterprise implementations like automated service delivery and anomaly detection—it’s no longer the presence of AI that’s notable, but the application of it,” said Jeff Stewart, vice president of global solutions engineering at SolarWinds. “Thanks in large part to impressive strides in the advancement of AI and machine learning this year, enterprises are better equipped than ever to solve, or even avoid, costly hits to their systems, services, or bottom line in 2024.”
For 2024, SolarWinds forecasts these themes—powered and accelerated by AI and machine learning—will shape the enterprise technology landscape:
Observability across the full tech stack will become a priority. According to SolarWinds research, the typical enterprise loses more than $13M annually to costs associated with the nine brownouts or outages experienced each month. Despite this, nearly half of IT professionals surveyed lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure. AI-powered observability solutions address this by collecting data to provide information on what’s not performing as expected and why—allowing teams to take a proactive approach to eliminating downtime, innovating, and exceeding customer expectations.
Organizations will prioritize getting to the root of database issues. One-third of IT professionals surveyed manage upwards of 300 databases. This year, teams will embrace AI and automation to ensure the health, stability, and scalability of their services. In addition to the ability to identify issues at their root cause, IT teams will benefit from real-time issue remediation, understanding database implications as new code is deployed, and even avoiding costly outages.
Organizations will embrace Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) to support busy teams. With AIOps, organizations can integrate data from across complex hybrid IT environments and receive the actionable, predictive intelligence they need to optimize performance, resolve issues quickly, and relieve pressure on IT teams. Furthermore, AIOps are paving the way toward autonomous operations, which will require little to no human intervention.
IT Service Management (ITSM) will support faster, more successful IT outcomes. On average, research shows that organizations surveyed who adopted AI-powered tools to meet their ITSM needs were able to reduce system downtime by 21% and decrease time spent resolving incident and service requests by 23%. Features such as virtual troubleshooting agents and guided incident resolution will continue to support the workload of IT teams in 2024. In fact, SolarWinds Service Desk customers surveyed reported saving 23 hours per week due to reduced ticket volume—nearly the equivalent of adding an extra employee to their team.
SolarWinds solutions are founded on the company’s close relationship with IT specialists. The company worked directly with customers through THWACK®, its community of over 180,000 users, to create and test the new AI capabilities and they guarantee they made IT professionals’ tasks easier.
