Bolstering Business Resiliency with AIOps

By Ajay Gandhi, Vice President of Product Marketing, Dynatrace

If the global cyber events of 2021, such as  Log4J, taught us anything, it’s that sustaining business operations and bolstering the bottom line depend on strong security. Organizations today face myriad challenges and obstacles in cyberspace — as multi cloud adoption skyrockets, newfound threat vectors evolve and emerge, as malicious actors continue to wreak havoc on unknowing enterprises.

What’s more, after two and a half years spent combating mounting threats, primarily remotely, security teams are burning out. Even worse, most security tasks today – detecting vulnerabilities, managing incident response and overseeing remediation – can be automated. In fact, nearly half (42%) of IT teams’ time is wasted on manual, routine work to “keep the lights on” across IT environments, according to recent research.

This drains productivity for developer and security teams, which prompts missed opportunities given innovation delays. This is where automated (AIOps driven) cybersecurity capabilities can enhance ongoing DevSecOps processes and bolster the business bottom line.

Driving Business Resiliency with AIOps

What do we mean by this? Artificial intelligence for IT operations, aka AIOps, uses AI to cut through the typical noise in IT operations, specifically incident management. Modern AIOps solutions are built for dynamic clouds and software development lifecycle (SDLC) automation because they combine full-stack observability with a deterministic AI engine that can yield precise, continuous, and actionable insights in real time.

This approach fosters business resiliency in the face of continually escalating vulnerabilities and global cybersecurity incidents. So as developers and security teams square up against widening threat vectors and newfound security concerns, it’s essential for organizations to embed AIOps-driven capabilities into their SDLC — to automate application security processes, bolster resiliency and retain top security talent.

An AIOps approach helps teams automate mundane security tasks and free up security and developer resources to spend more time on innovation-oriented work. AIOps also enable organizations to develop a security posture/risk management strategy that’s not only automated but also anticipatory of the next business disruption like the Log4Shell vulnerability. More secure digital services accelerate throughput.

Not all AIOps are Created Equal

But not all AIOps capabilities are created equal. As you’re assessing which AIOps-enhanced tooling is the best fit for your business, here are key factors to consider:

• Identification and vulnerability prioritization. Identifying threats in your IT ecosystem is only half of the battle. AI can also expedite the detection and remediation of potential vulnerabilities by providing teams with a clear understanding of the highest-priority vulnerabilities to address – therefore eliminating the time they spend chasing false positives.
• Proactive remediation of vulnerabilities. Look for tools that integrate with other DevOps toolchains (i.e. Atlassian, Slack, ServiceNow) to get more value from your cyberstrategy. In today’s world, it’s essential that organizations proactively protect all systems to help mitigate security risks early on. Collaboration between platforms and toolchains can help bolster these efforts.
• Lastly, automate attack detection and blocking. Think, delivering runtime application self-protection for key Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) threats; such as SQL injections and command injections. In other words, automate attack detection and blocking to keep your organization resilient in the face of ongoing attacks.

As cloud complexity and cyberthreats grow, managing environments with manual processes isn’t feasible. Automation to capture observability data and harness AIOps provides DevSecOps teams with the control they need. By analyzing data on activity in real time, teams can unlock the insights developers need to accelerate innovation.

Again, not all tools that support AIOps are created equal. But with AI-enhanced cybersecurity capabilities, organizations will be better equipped to reduce risk across the software development lifecycle, accelerate throughput and secure modern cloud workloads and applications across the enterprise – all while enabling the security and developer workforce to do what it loves most: innovating.

About the Author

Ajay is the VP of product marketing at Dynatrace. Prior to joining Dynatrace, Ajay helped launch other groundbreaking software platforms at Salesforce, Informatica, Shape Security and BEA. Based in Silicon Valley, Ajay is passionate about travel, cycling and having fun with his two daughters.

Ajay can be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajaygandhi/