Turn Down the Noise: Ensure Stable Operations for Consumers
Consumers rely heavily on always-on industries such as banking, utilities and health care. As these sectors continue to expand their digital and online offerings, ensuring continuous operations is more pressing than ever because consumers increasingly depend on digital services in their everyday lives. Consider the consequences of customers not being able to check their bank balances, book a doctor’s appointment or pay their electricity bill.
Extended service downtime can cause significant financial and reputational damage, with recent research showing the average cost per incident to be nearly $800,000. When you consider that incidents affecting consumers grew by 43% in 2024, the increased frequency can result in soaring operations costs with every outage, leaving customers and revenue in the lurch.
One of the biggest factors limiting an organization’s ability to respond is alert noise. Technical teams are being disrupted by flapping alerts, irrelevant or low-priority alerts or a deluge of alerts from different systems stemming from the same root cause. The “noise” of these alerts distracts from the most important task at hand: remediation.
So what steps can be taken to streamline incident management and help keep vital services online?
1. Gain a Holistic View of All Alerts for Easy Prioritization
Critical industries receive a high number of alerts for several reasons: They are highly attractive targets for bad actors due to the sensitive data they manage, their operating systems often run on legacy technology and they must remain “always on” for consumer availability.
Without automated anomaly detection in place, the volume of alerts can easily grow beyond a human’s capability to manage. IT teams can be easily overwhelmed by noncritical alerts as issues are continuously flagged, especially without automated triage systems to determine an incident’s severity.
In manual, legacy ticketing systems, every alert must be checked, even if it doesn’t require human-assisted remediation. This time-consuming process creates toil for IT teams and reduces the time available to them to implement improvements in their organization’s systems.
Organizations operating in critical industries should implement a single pane of glass that grants visibility over every alert raised. For this platform to be effective, it must automatically triage and categorize alerts based on their severity and scale, helping IT teams to determine which alerts require manual remediation and which can be resolved with automated workflows.
2. Use Automation To Identify When To Involve Humans
The next step organizations must take to keep their operations available 24/7 is to reduce the blast radius of incidents. To identify incidents and anomalies earlier and more quickly, organizations should integrate automation into their incident response, generate alerts and direct them toward the appropriate team members.
Automated incident monitoring tools can significantly accelerate incident management by ensuring that, when human intervention is necessary, the right team members are alerted to an incident as it arises. A more targeted approach to incident management also allows teams to avoid all-hands “war rooms” and prevents disparate team members from being pulled into incident remediation at short notice. This is a crucial step in avoiding toil, stress and burnout for incident responders, allowing them to focus on driving innovation.
3. Use Automated Remediation Tools To Drive Response
Once alerts are detected and categorized, and human teams have been assembled to remediate issues where necessary, organizations must begin to trust automated workflows to resolve less serious, more common incidents.
Implementing these processes requires two actions from organizations.
The first is to acquire and integrate the right tools to automatically apply fixes, which can include autonomous AI agents or less sophisticated workflows and scripts, especially for known and recurring issues.
The second is more challenging: a mindset shift. It is crucial to build trust that automated tools can resolve minor incidents and understand that they will save IT teams’ time by reducing the hours spent fighting fires.
Making these changes will yield major wins. The introduction of automated workflows for remediation will reduce system (and service) downtime, ensuring customers aren’t locked out of bank accounts or medical services. It will also free IT teams to innovate and create an improved, smoother customer experience while ensuring the services they rely on are of the highest quality.
When Noise Is Too Loud, Use Automation To Turn It Down
Legacy operations management processes no longer pass muster for organizations that provide essential services. Consumers cannot afford to be locked out of systems for hours at a time in the event of an outage, and service providers can no longer afford to spend hours resolving incidents with no transparency.
Consumers expect convenience in today’s digital-first world with essential services at their fingertips. Organizations must adopt automation across their operations management systems to deliver the level of service consumers demand. Doing so will reduce the burden of alerts and incidents on IT teams, allowing them to focus on resolving serious incidents. It will also allow them to ensure crucial services remain online for consumers and that they are continuously improved to make consumers’ lives much easier.
