How To Use the Autonomous Operations FAQ - Dell ...

September, 2021

How To Use the Autonomous Operations FAQ
To help you navigate the emerging technology landscape of Autonomous Operations and the
incredible opportunities it will present to your business, we have put together a short guide with
frequently asked questions and important information resources.

This guide will not only help you understand what Autonomous Operations is, but where we are
in the stages of adoption and implementation maturity. This guide will give you our point of view
on how to look at the vast array of technologies available today and where to begin to apply this
to your business, as well as ultimately, who is available to help you navigate this driver of digital
transformation.

Key Takeaways
   •   Every company is now a technology company
   •   Digital Transformation has changed what is possible but at the same time, has
       placed unprecedented new strains on IT.
   •   As every organization continues to prioritize technology investments, they now
       face increased competition for talent. Creating what might be the largest skilled
       labor gap in IT history.
   •   Autonomous Operations is helping to bring digital transformation to the masses
       by democratizing the key capabilities through intelligent infrastructure and
       intelligent operations software.

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September, 2021

Overview
Business Is Digital
Understanding of Digital Transformation and its benefits continues to mature. In fact, in our
recent Digital Transformation Index, we see that the customer maturity curve towards this
transformation is progressing and even accelerating. But while this digital transformation is
helping customers realize new business outcomes like greater agility and creating new value
from data, it has at the same time, created massive competition for technology workers. That’s
because as every company embraces the reality that they are a technology company (what
Gartner calls, The Digicorp), it means reliance on digital transformation to form competitive
differentiation and achieve technology fueled objectives has become near ubiquitous. Put
simply, we might just be facing the largest skills gap we’ve ever seen - this is on the level that
may surpass even the industrial and internet revolutions. These skill gaps are creating hurdles
to maximizing the opportunity of digital transformation, and some organizations are turning to
public cloud providers to bridge these gaps. Autonomous Operations (AIOps) is a critical area
for Dell to invest in on order to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation.

Challenges for IT
With no question, digital transformation holds much promise, but it has also introduced
new challenges that organizations must address. The pace of technology driven change
is accelerating at a compounding rate, bringing with it the volumes, velocity, varieties,
and an increased complexity of the data and tasks that must be managed. To become
swift, fully agile, responsive, and customer obsessed, the modern business cannot be
held back by legacy technology and processes. Rather, they must be propelled forward
and fueled by future technology while embracing new and simplified ways of operating.
In short, to take control of their potential, they must let go.
But change is hard, and change is complicated. This ever-expanding scope and added
IT responsibilities is a result of more parts of the business coming online.

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September, 2021

Frequently Asked Questions
What is Autonomous Operations?
It’s a smarter way to run IT where tasks are automated to reduce the effort required,
drive efficiencies, address the growing gap in IT resources, and where and when right
for the business, the need for human intervention can be removed entirely – elevating IT
resources to their full potential.

We believe Autonomous Operations is the critical combination of Artificial Intelligence
for IT Operations (AIOps) with the ability to swiftly act upon data with intelligent
Infrastructure that can be instrumented to automate tasks.

How will Autonomous Operations help me achieve my
business goals?
Autonomous Operations delivers a radically simplified IT management experience. This
means leaders are able to spend less time intervening on routine maintenance while at
the same time enjoying higher service levels and enhanced security with access to
more IT operations data and the ability to implement self-healing measures.
We see the immediate impacts of AO in three key areas;
•   Elevating IT Resources - Spend more time delivering value and less time managing
    infrastructure to augment a true human/machine partnership that increases employee
    productivity.
•   Operating with Confidence - Higher service levels and improved performance that mitigate
    security threats leads to greater availability because you are built on a secure and reliable
    foundation.
•   Unleashing your true potential - A more informed and responsive business powered by data
    and driven by AI that solves problems and deploys IT resources faster. You are free to
    move at the speed of business.
Will Autonomous Operations and AIOps replace IT staff?
Absolutely not! Autonomous Operations is about taking full advantage of a positive and
rewarding human/machine partnership. AO is meant to augment the full potential of IT
skills by letting the system take care of routine, repetitive, and unrewarding tasks. But of
course, oversight, direction and control are maintained by the people. Simply put,
Autonomous Operations while incredibly powerful, doesn't work without the people.
In fact, we believe Autonomous Operations will be an important bridge across a growing
IT skills gap and will help you retain IT staff by offering greater opportunity to align your
human capital resources to rewarding and strategic initiatives. And AO will also deliver a
more sustainable and friendlier work life balance for IT reducing the volume of pager
calls and long hours spent upgrading over the weekend.

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September, 2021

How can you apply Autonomous Operations in your business
and how do you get started?
We get it, change is hard. We are going through it ourselves and at the same time are
using this experience to help customers like you to navigate to their own success. It's
this direct experience and our focus on driving innovation that has helped us form a
motif framework for Autonomous Operations. This construct that we call the AO
continuum helps to make sense of the depth and breadth of various technologies that
play a role in realizing and implement autonomy within IT operations.

The continuum organizes AO technologies based on their business and IT outcomes
along with the level of complexity, while being considerate of the current maturity of the
technology. Unlike a maturity model where progress is defined and measured by
maniacal progress upwards, the AO continuum should be seen horizontally. This is
because different outcomes are the right answer for different business’s like your own
and even for different areas of the business.

This means that sometimes partial automation where human input is required for all
operations is the right end state, where as supervised autonomy where the system can
handle all operations with only a few exceptions may be right for another line of
business.

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September, 2021

Why Dell Technologies?
Why is Dell Technologies bullish on AO and investing in this
area of innovation?
Dell technologies is the largest IT infrastructure provider on the planet. With companies
of all sizes relying on us to be their essential technology partner, the opportunity and the
responsibility is upon us to not only embrace autonomous operations, but to champion
it. We’ve always been a company who (A) is purpose built for transformation and (B)
“makes it real.”

Dell brings to market the expertise, experience, and a full stack portfolio across both of
intelligent hardware and software that helps to deliver on the vision, promise and
framework for autonomous operations.

More specifically, from a technology perspective, how do we
deliver AO outcomes?
Think of delivering AO outcomes with three building blocks;

•   First, there’s intelligent infrastructure with built-in automation to eliminate many manual
    administration tasks and to self-optimize. That’s the Power portfolio of products: PowerEdge,
    PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, PowerProtect and PowerSwitch plus VxRail and
    APEX services.
•   Next there’s CloudIQ, AIOps software for intelligent insights about infrastructure health,
    performance and capacity, so IT can fix things fast, even before they impact the business.
•   Finally, there are APIs, application programming interfaces, for integrating intelligent insights
    from CloudIQ with tools like ServiceNow, Slack, Teams and Ansible to streamline IT’s
    response and even automate infrastructure to fix itself.

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September, 2021

Resources
Where can you find more information on Autonomous Operations and Dell
Technologies?

Attend the Autonomous Operations event on September 22, 2021
Dell Technologies Autonomous Operations page
Perspective blog – Making History with Autonomous Operations
Talking Tech with Travis (YouTube vLog) (blog)

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