Self-healing enterprise: how is AI changing the value profile of the enterprise?

December 2019 | SPOTLIGHT | BOARDROOM INTELLIGENCE

Financier Worldwide Magazine

December 2019 Issue

For most digital enterprises, software and business have become intertwined to such an extent that it is difficult to separate the two. In other words, software outages, problem resolution delays and application development issues have all become business risks. At the same time, software continuity and performance has become enterprise continuity and business performance.

Thankfully, with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), enterprises can eliminate many of the most common technology risks as well as create business value. AI-based prevention, known as self-healing, enables the quick diagnosis and rectification of issues before they lead to major problems. Self-healing technology represents both a paradigm shift in IT, as well as an opportunity for digital enterprises to reduce their software and computing infrastructure costs while increasing revenues.

Digital transformation imperative: software is the business

From customer relations to production, the integration of digital technology into a company significantly changes how a business operates. Therefore, software has a profound impact on how value is created and delivered. Boards and the C-suite, for instance, are already driving significant digital transformation efforts. Market Research Engine reported that business spending on digital transformation is expected to exceed more than $650bn by 2024 and will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 18.5 percent between 2018 and 2024.

Software has been the main fuel for change in the last two decades. Technological advances in edge and cloud computing, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI are all accelerating the software-driven digital transformation. This is affecting operational improvements and the shifting of business models is also impacting value models from sourcing to production to customer engagement.

Defining a self-healing enterprise

A self-healing system is essentially an always-on operation that runs 24/7. Self-healing systems can prevent software problems by addressing leading issues before they turn into problems which can impact service. An enterprise which is self-healing will have the predictive ability to detect lead signals for potential issues, pinpoint those issues with precision, isolate root causes and resolve them automatically before they lead to service disruptions. All of this is made possible by AI-driven autonomous IT operations software.

Already today it is common for monitoring tools to have some AI capabilities. However, fixing a problem that has already happened is not self-healing. True self-healing is about avoiding issues before they turn into a problem. Self-healing systems have foresight which allows them to predict where issues might arise in the future, saving IT teams both time and headache.

Self-healing enterprises can capture value from three value drivers by elevating user experience, optimising resources and achieving business continuity.

Elevating customer experience

Increasing customer acquisition is critical for digital enterprise, as each new customer can bring revenue multiples from services in addition to the future cross-sell and upsell opportunities. While acquiring new customers can be a significant cost item for sales and marketing, a digital enterprise has many tools at its disposal to target prospects and turn them into customers. That can happen via both online and offline touchpoints. With all of these touchpoints, businesses have to provide superior experience throughout the customer journey, from initial touch to post purchase and support.

A self-healing enterprise can record significant improvements in its customer experience compared to its peers. Self-healing systems can reduce unplanned outages which can lead to an improvement of brand perception and protection. They can also eliminate performance issues from the online user journey. Finally, transactional businesses such as e-commerce, banking and pay per use services can increase their customer acquisition by reducing abandonment rates.

Optimising resources

It can be difficult to forecast how business growth will impact capacity requirements. To solve this problem, digital enterprises typically over-deploy assets or use cloud auto-scaling. Unfortunately, both methods are costly and more of an expensive insurance policy than a long-term solution. That is where AI comes in: foresight capability enables enterprises to predict future requirements and adjust accordingly.

With usage volumes and a knowledge of their impact on the overall system, it is possible to run capacity planning scenarios against business growth projections. As a result of these predictions, finance and business leaders can precisely plan for future capacity requirements because they can simulate the operational impact of growth. In this way, self-healing capabilities help optimise capital expenditure on capacity while reducing software and infrastructure overcapacity.

Business value chain and continuity

In a digital enterprise, where software is the business, it is paramount that application development cycles happen as quickly as possible. By developing applications from the very beginning based on foresight about potential application behaviour, development teams can produce higher quality applications, reduce the amount of required testing and bring products to market faster.

Many organisations bridge their supply chains at different levels through application programming interface (API) connections. These connections enable seamless supply chain operations. Self-healing systems can make these relationships continuous by preventing outages which can help to cut costs and improve revenues.

Creating a self-healing organisation in three steps

First, AI can assist humans in planning for optimum capacity. Once implemented, AI can learn the ins and outs of capacity models and then maintain them. It can determine underutilised or overutilised software components and make adjustments accordingly. AI can even simulate expected workload changes based on growth projections. These simulations can be helpful in precisely sizing capacity to meet future needs. This first stage is commonly referred to as projected healing with use of AI-assisted prevention.

Second, AI predicts issues by proactively analysing software modules to look for early warning signals. This analysis highlights the most important performance metrics and includes forensics data to help triage the cause of early warning signals. These analyses are used to take proactive healing actions like adjusting system configurations or writing additional scripts to automatically heal the issues. This second stage is commonly referred to as proactive self-healing.

Third, autonomous self-healing augments all of the capabilities from the first two levels, then adds independent action. At this stage, an enterprise is capable of executing the entire healing cycle automatically by detecting warning signals, predicting problems and rectifying the issues which caused the warning signals in the first place. Here, an AI system understands what behaviour is expected from each part of the application, so that whenever a prediction is generated, a rectifying action is triggered and the issue is healed proactively.

The right time to implement a self-healing system

Self-healing systems upgrade digital enterprise from the current model of break and fix to a more proactive one of predict and prevent. The result is a better customer experience, less downtime, cost savings and the ability to reassign parts of the IT department to work on more pressing issues. Organisations which integrate self-healing systems have a competitive advantage over those that do not, well outweighing any upfront costs of this burgeoning technology.

Self-healing benefits are different for every company even if they are from same industry. The first step for business and finance leaders should be initiating a pilot to see the proof of value by implementing select self-healing cases for one application.

Nitin Kumar is chief executive and Cuneyt Buyukbezci is chief marketing officer at Appnomic Systems Inc. Mr Kumar can be contacted by email: nitin.k@appnomic.com. Mr Buyukbezci can be contacted by email: cuneyt.b@appnomic.com.

Nitin Kumar and Cuneyt Buyukbezci

Appnomic Systems Inc.