4 Ways Event-Driven Automation for IT Operations in 2024

Updated on Jan 12

3 min read

Table of contents

1. Automate incident management with auto-remediation 2. Deliver more responsive IT services 3. Reduce IT costs 4. Secure IT systems Further Reading

The growing size of data and diversification of IT environments make manual handling of business processes difficult and time-consuming. Businesses respond to this challenge by automating business processes. By 2024, IT operations costs are estimated to reduce by 30%, according to Gartner. Automation replaces manual tasks and brings efficiency to business processes.

A type of such automation is event-driven automation. It enables businesses to facilitate processes in IT operations and remove redundancies by automating workloads based on events and thresholds.

By adopting and employing event-driven automation, businesses can accelerate their workflows, prevent clogs, and eliminate tedious processes. This article will provide 4 important use cases of event-driven automation for businesses.

1. Automate incident management with auto-remediation

In busy times, IT teams face too many requests and complaints from employees and these often result in clogs and delays. Event-driven automation helps IT teams deal with these issues by automating the problem-solving process.

Once an issue occurs, such as a Wi-Fi connection problem, event-driven automation detects the problem and triggers an auto-remediation system (Figure 1). When the issue is resolved, users and the IT teams receive a notification about it.

Figure 1: Auto-Remediation

Source: Auto-Remediation & Event-Driven Automation

Using event-driven automation saves both users and IT teams time and eliminates the manual issue-handling process. Reducing the workload of IT teams, event-driven automation tools help IT teams focus on more innovative processes.

A good example of the use of event-driven automation is Netflix. The company adopted event-driven automation for monitoring and remediation of microservices such as building integration with monitoring tools and managing deployment cycles and security. Once an alert is received based on predefined rules, the auto-remediation steps in and acts according to the rules. Thereby, Netflix engineers eliminated repeatable, manual, and time-consuming tasks.

Explore how RPA automates incident management. IT incident management in more detail.

2. Deliver more responsive IT services

Whether companies work on-site or remotely, IT teams receive many support requests regarding IT issues. For example, it is found that password tickets take nearly 40% of all help desk time. Using event-driven automation provides a significant advantage in improving the response times of IT teams.

Event-driven automation helps IT teams have a faster service delivery and reduces the risk of human error. Automating and remediating simple tasks lets them focus on more important tasks that can not be automated.

LinkedIn, a leading business and employment platform, benefited from event-driven automation in problem-solving of IT issues. Initially, engineers performed troubleshooting manually. Due to the company’s steady growth, they decided to automate problem-solving processes for simple issues. This allowed engineers to focus on higher-value activities such as improving monitoring processes. The automated remediation system helped the IT staff save time and build new skills.

3. Reduce IT costs

Receiving a high number of IT support tickets can be costly for a company. Even duplicates can drive up costs. IT staff try to handle every ticket as quickly as possible but these tickets incur high costs. A study found that the cost per ticket for the service desk is significantly high. (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The North American averages and ranges for Cost per Ticket by channel in 2021

Source: Best of HDI in 2021-Understanding the Service Desk Metric of Cost per Ticket

Businesses can benefit from automated problem-solving and combine automation tools with machine learning (ML). ML helps to detect and solve the issue without any need for manual interference by IT staff. Thereby, IT teams receive fewer support tickets.

For instance, a financial institution’s IT department automated 30% of these kinds of requests with event-driven automation and saved more than $500,000 a year in IT ticketing costs.

4. Secure IT systems

By using event-driven automation, companies can automate their security processes. Security teams can analyze events and determine solutions to security vulnerabilities. Once event-driven automation is in place, security teams can detect and address security threats. It can also monitor and measure compliance and government regulations.

Ergo, an insurance group in Europe, benefitted from event-driven automation in security. They needed an improved security solution to monitor events in real-time. They found a solution to automate the response to the events according to the security policies of the company. As a result, the company improved its security environment and compliance.

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.