Pave the Way to Self-Healing IT Automation with Digital Experience Management
A self-healing support desk enables the shift from reactive to proactive IT operations. By predicting and solving problems before users complain, organizations can lower service desk ticket volumes and minimize downtime. As a result, your employees’ productivity is not compromised, and IT staff can focus on more strategic tasks.
A self-healing support desk enables the shift from reactive to proactive IT operations. By predicting and solving problems before users complain, organizations can lower service desk ticket volumes and minimize downtime. As a result, your employees’ productivity is not compromised, and IT staff can focus on more strategic tasks.
What’s Self-Healing Technology?
Self-healing is the ability for IT systems to instantly detect and automatically respond to issues without human intervention. This type of automation helps to reduce IT costs and unlock better digital experience.
Benefits of Self-Healing Automation
Self-healing systems help organizations to better meet business outcomes because IT costs and employee productivity are key performance indicators (KPIs).
Specific benefits include:
Increased IT efficiency and scalability
With fewer help desk calls and support tickets to handle, technicians can spend less time troubleshooting and use their skills more effectively on more high-value projects.
Due to its scalable nature, this type of automation also helps the IT team get a grip on growing workloads. It’s possible to solve more tech issues and help more users without straining resources and overextending the staff.
Lower IT costs
Eliminating help desk tickets has an evident impact on the bottom line. To give an idea, each internal IT ticket costs an average of $22.50, according to Lakeside Software’s 2021 survey about digital employee experience.
By redesigning operation processes with the use of hyperautomation technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), organizations are expected to reduce costs by 30% by 2024, according to Gartner.
Reduced downtime and higher productivity
When users spend time on IT issues and service calls, their productivity is disrupted. Self-healing infrastructure minimizes the risks of outages and interruptions that impact employee productivity and business continuity.
Enhanced digital experience and employee satisfaction
According to Lakeside research, about half of employees say they only report a tech issue to IT departments 60% of the time or less. This data suggests that many users end up suffering through IT problems that drain their productivity.
Employees are often reluctant to contact the service desk and submit tickets because of the wasted time spent on resolution. With self-healing IT, issues are proactively resolved before the user even notices them.
From Reactive IT to Proactive IT Operations
A reactive approach to IT is when support desk teams wait to respond to incidents after they occur. For example, after a user complains about the lack of disk space to save documents, only then a technician takes a look into the issue. With a proactive approach, IT strives to prevent incidents from happening or escalating, address potential problems before employees notice, and minimize the impact on productivity.
With the right IT solution, intelligent sensors can detect when a certain threshold is reached and automatically intervene. To go back to the previous example, a sensor that detects low disk space can be tied to an action to free up space by deleting files in the recycle bin.
A self-healing help desk solves issues before they affect users thanks to a combination of:
- Early detection
- Proactive intervention
- Predictive analysis
- Automation
Self-Healing Infrastructure Management Enables Better Digital Experience
Machine learning (ML) algorithms and automation are key components of self-healing systems. In fact, self-healing capabilities are one of the benefits of deploying AIOps, which stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations, as part of your organization’s digital experience management (DEM) strategy. With Lakeside Prevent — part of Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack — companies can leverage the power of AIOps and digital experience data to prevent IT issues from impacting the user’s productivity.
Automation capabilities for help desk efficiency is one of the most valuable tools to improve digital experience, according to IT staff surveyed by Lakeside. Lakeside’s report indicates that, for 70% of the IT staff, self-healing is the most useful mechanism when it comes to automating IT services.
Digital experience management platforms such as Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud can help operational teams to identify opportunities for self-healing. These solutions have the advantage of being deeply rooted in data and AIOps, which enable them to provide expanded visibility into the entire IT environment and intelligence to optimize IT resources and digital experience.
Key Features of Help Desk Automation
Here a few ways digital experience management can help organizations leverage IT automation to make the shift to proactive service desk operations.
Endpoint monitoring
Continuous monitoring is a critical step to self-healing machine learning technologies. Lakeside’s platform tracks virtual and physical infrastructure, applications, networks, user usage data, and more by collecting more than 10,000 metrics every 15 seconds.
Data-driven analytics
Thanks to the use of machine-learning techniques, Lakeside Prevent quickly triages incidents, detects data patterns, and prevents disruptions. Automated sensors continuously evaluate the IT environment and trigger alerts when certain conditions reach a threshold or an anomaly is detected. Our powerful solution is even able to prioritize issues based on severity and number of systems impacted.
Automated remediation
Actions can be tied to sensors to automate resolution. For example:
- It’s possible to establish policy-based controls defining the events or conditions under which specific automated responses will automatically be executed without human intervention.
- Sensors can also trigger alerts to the support team when certain thresholds are exceeded. With Lakeside Assist, for example, Level 1 technicians can mass heal devices with one-click auto-fixes.
- End users might be presented with the option to initiate automated remediation without requiring IT administrator approval or interaction.
Achieve Level 0 Support with Lakeside
Level 0 support is when IT deflects incidents away from the service desk through early detection and remediation. Take the example of Standard Chartered Bank, which has successfully implemented proactive IT operations and self-healing with the help of Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud.
“Before a customer can report an issue, we are fixing that issue,” said Mabes Suleman, Head of Desktop Services at Standard Chartered Bank. “We are fixing things in the background. We may afterwards go retrospectively and say, ‘Do you realize you’ve had 10 blue screens of death that you didn’t know about because they were fixed?’”
By relying on automation and data-driven decisions, Standard Chartered Bank has been able to improve digital experience.
Get a Strong Catalogue of Built-In Scripts
Given the importance of self-healing mechanisms to optimize IT processes and digital experience, companies looking for DEM vendors should consider their out-of-the-box automation capabilities. Lakeside’s platform comes with a library of over 200 prebuilt scripts that infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams can utilize or re-edit to solve common problems.
Digital Experience Cloud also provides tooling to help administrators build their own scripts. Automated remediation tasks can be executed simultaneously on specific groups of user devices, such as by user role, device type, or other common characteristics.
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