THE PRIMACY OF ITSM

Rajesh Ganesan, Vice President, ManageEngine discusses the importance of ITSM in the era of remote working

Rajesh Ganesan Vice President, ManageEngine

THE PRIMACY OF ITSM curity exposure of the corporate network could also increase without updated network compliance protocols. Since remote working already poses a security risk from an employee perspective, it would be prudent to enforce strict network compliance Discuss the challenges organizations VPNs, monitoring these connections and protocols and back up device configuraface in terms of network management their bandwidth is crucial. Firewall re- tion changes consistently. due to more people working remotely? strictions on the number of VPN connec There are various challenges that orga- tions and the peak hour utilization also Server resource utilization: Monitor nizations are facing during this pandem- need to be critically monitored. memory, CPU and disk utilization paic in terms of network management, as rameters of physical and virtual servers employees embrace remote working and Network security: Lack of a secure to make sure critical services and applicaas the internet traffic continues to rise. corporate network and BYOD adoption tions have adequate resources to process Organizations need to monitor the essen- exposes employee devices to a lot of net- and deliver incoming user requests. Autotial network elements and critical IT ap- work security threats and malware. Fire- mate troubleshooting tasks such as start/ plications that are necessary to sustain an wall security log analysis and user ac- stop/restart for individual instances. uninterrupted business service delivery. tivity monitoring can help identify such remote issues that can infiltrate the cor- Application response time: End user facVPN: Since employees are now con- porate network and attack other devices. ing applications have to deliver a seamless nected to the company's network through Network configuration changes: The se- user experience, even while processing

numerous simultaneous user requests. Delayed response in critical transactions could be the result of slow SQL statements.

End user experience: Synthetic transaction monitoring allows you to simulate end user journeys through your website; record and replay these transactions from anywhere around the globe. This means, any problems with website elements (html, css, images, scripts, etc.) including third party integrations can be contributing to slow performance.

Capacity planning and performance

forecasting: Measure growth and utilization trends of business critical servers and applications. Historical trend analysis can help in understanding usage patterns and predict the rate of saturation of applications. Load distribution and capacity upgrade decisions become easier with granular performance reports.

In remote working era, please tell us some of your IT Management tools that help in terms of enabling monitoring, securing etc.

Remote working brings with it new data security risks, especially the risk of both unintentional and malicious data exfiltration. ManageEngine's Desktop Central and Password Manager Pro, help manage and secure endpoints and passwords, respectively. With the launch of sophisticated phishing attacks, organizations must keep a close watch over user accounts. For instance, it’s vital to monitor users who log on from multiple locations simultaneously or who access multiple resources in a short period of time. Therefore, our new-gen SIEM solutions like Log360, which includes user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) capabilities, and our privileged access management solution, PAM360 can be very useful for enterprises.

To provide remote employees the access they need to exclusive information within the corporate network, organizations have to ensure secure remote access. This can be done using our Remote Access Plus and Access Manager Plus solutions, which is available to organisations of every size.

A recent survey from you indicated that a good number of organizations haven’t invested in self service desks and virtual agents that hamper them during the pandemic times. That is surprising but do you see more organizations realizing the importance and looking to invest in such solutions?

While collaboration tools and cloud investments would certainly see an uptick, IT service desk teams would also continue to invest in chat bots and virtual assistants to shift left regular tickets through self-healing and diagnosis of issues rather than flood the service desk teams with level 1 tickets.

One of the primary functions of enterprise IT has been collecting data and building workflows around it. There are numerous domains where the first step in implementing AI would be to collect data and that would involve costs to digitize and plumb data to a central repository. The data-driven business model is transitioning to the enterprise, where we have a wealth of data lying around after the digitization wave of the past decade. The next decade is going to be all about using this data to a competitive advantage via AI.

How do you see the state of the Middle East market, from SME to large enterprises, as being invested in advanced ITSM tools?

From our experience over the last fifteen years, companies in the Middle East have always demonstrated the pursuit of process maturity and adopting standards. The obvious next step is execution and IT teams have led the way in technology adoption and deploying tools to automate their IT and service management processes. In recent years, the governments in the region have shown a great intent to leverage technology as an enabler and differentiator, motivating businesses of all verticals and sizes. Simultaneously, technology consumption by individuals is also growing at an extremely fast rate in the Middle East, driving them to have the same level of user experience with the enterprise IT systems. Given all these factors, from ManageEngine's perspective, we do see companies being proactive and are willing to make the investment in taking their IT service delivery and IT service management programs to match the user expectations.

Have cloud enabled versions been showing greater sales traction in the region now for ManageEngine?

There has always been a demand for cloud and cloud-based applications in the Middle East and the pandemic has only accelerated its demand. In this current crisis, 'Cloud-enabled' businesses were able to quickly move to a workfrom-home (WFH) mode and maintain productivity. This year we have seen a 50 percent increase in sales traction for all of our cloud-based solutions in the UAE. Be it to prepare for the next crisis or to make WFH an ongoing practice, businesses are prioritising cloud initiatives. Our expectation is that the cloud adoption rate in the Middle East region will accelerate in 2021, and for the next several years.

What's the role for AI in ITSM and from ManageEngine’s point of view?

By nature AI and ITSM have similar objectives and hence ITSM offers a ripe set of opportunities to deploy AI. ITSM solutions are increasingly deploying AI techniques to offer value to end users by cutting down response times and increasing satisfaction.

ITSM differs from the rest of the IT management suite by the fact that it has more human generated data than machine generated data and hence the need for deploying powerful NLP techniques. Chatbots can help customers search through the existing knowledge base and can hand over control as and when necessary to human agents. Asset tracking can also become easier, with AI based techniques converting semi structured information like emails, chat conversations and more into auditable asset registries. AI in ITSM can also identify the context of a ticket as soon as it lands in the tool, understand its context and assign the ticket to the right agent available, thereby enabling faster resolution.

Powerful OCR techniques can also retrieve information from a variety of data sources like invoices, purchase orders and fetch relevant information for the agents. Various time series techniques can also give a good insight into the trends of tickets, closure rates, satisfaction rates and asset deployment strategies.

AI has so much to offer for ITSM and I'm sure AI is no longer a luxury, but a necessity in ITSM!