Gone are the days when corporate employees had to travel to the office/headquarters for work. In 2022, IT companies and other corporate entities have embraced the remote work culture. With the rise of satellite offices and virtual desktops, remote work is now a reality. The recent COVID pandemic augmented the demand for remote work resources. Since employees could not travel to the office during the pandemic, they were forced to adapt to the remote work culture. However, everything is not easy when it comes to managing a remote workforce. Companies without any proper strategy might not manage their remote employees efficiently. Read on to understand how top managed service providers in India can optimise their remote workforce management with AIOps-led solutions. 

MSPs and remote workforce management

MSPs have clients with several expectations. Usually, corporate entities and large-scale organisations are clients of MSPs. An organisation will depend on an MSP for the management of IT infrastructure. An MSP will install cybersecurity software, provide technical support, perform monitoring, and fix technical issues for its clients. MSPs were among the first ones to adapt to the remote work culture in the country. However, an MSP will have to manage its workforce remotely to achieve the desired results. How will an MSP measure the performance of its workforce remotely? Well, AIOps-led solutions have proved to be a vital solution for managing the remote workforce. Let us apprehend how an AIOps-led solution makes it easy to optimise remote workforce management. 

Monitoring the remote workforce

Let us say an MSP has many satellite offices to offer a home-like work environment to employees. Since the satellite offices are far from the headquarter, a CIO/CTO might not visit them. How will the MSP monitor the performance of remote employees? Monitoring the performance of employees is more than important for an MSP. An MSP cannot afford employees sitting idle in satellite offices and wasting valuable resources. However, remote monitoring is not so easy, and traditional tools aren’t helping MSPs. 

Top managed service providers in India have provided their remote employees with virtual desktops. MSPs can easily deploy applications or computing power on virtual desktops and help their employees with remote work. However, monitoring user behaviour on virtual machines is a challenge for MSPs. A user might use the office resources for personal gains or transfer the business data to a rival. An MSP will not know anything until there is a solution to monitor the remote workforce. Besides monitoring the IT infrastructure of clients, an MSP also has to monitor its end-user and software systems. 

AIOps-led solutions can perform 24*7 monitoring of the remote workforce. Any action taken on a virtual machine from a remote location will be known in real-time. If an employee shows abnormal behaviour on a virtual machine, AIOps-led solutions will generate a red flag in real time using the event correlation and pattern recognition capabilities. Even if there is no one in the headquarters, AIOps-led solutions will monitor the remote workforce. The best part about AIOps is that the data is collected from multiple sources. An AIOps-led system analyses the data to detect outliers. The outliers in the performance data or system data tell us about anomalies. 

Allocating the right resources to the remote workforce

MSPs have to provide remote employees with the required resources at all times. Without the required computation power of software applications, MSP employees might not maintain service reliability. Let us say an MSP has deployed a virtual desktop infrastructure to help employees with remote work. How will the MSP know when to provide employees with additional computational power? How will the MSP know when a virtual machine is nearing exhaustion? 

AIOps-led solutions monitor remote virtual machines at all times. Every day, an AIOps-led solution will draw a pattern resembling the normal behaviour of a virtual machine or software system. If the behaviour of the system deviates from the normal pattern, AIOps triggers an alarm. If a software system or virtual machine is nearing exhaustion, you will know beforehand with AIOps. MSPs have to scale IT resources according to demand and workload. An AIOps-led system will help MSPs meet the resource requirements of remote employees. 

Resolving IT issues/incidents

Remote MSP employees might face technical issues which prevent them from maintaining service reliability. There might be incidents related to virtual desktops that prevent remote employees to perform their duties. If an IT incident is not fixed timely, it can have a disastrous effect. MSPs with a higher MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve) for IT incidents suffer from downtime and system failures. 

Why can MSPs not solve an IT incident quickly? It is because an MSP might spend much time detecting the root cause of the IT incident. When the root cause isn’t known, IT teams are without any target and don’t know where to begin. AIOps-led solutions are excellent at root cause analysis. With event correlation and pattern detection, an AIOps-led system can detect the root cause of an IT incident. You will get to know which virtual machine is causing trouble. Once the source of an IT incident is known, IT teams can fix the issue quickly and reduce MTTR. 

Security & automation

When dealing with a remote workforce, security is the biggest challenge for an MSP. Even if the employees are working remotely, they will have access to business data. The size of the business and performance data will increase after each day. An MSP cannot allow business data to get into the wrong hands. Not to forget, an MSP will have access to sensitive corporate data from its clients. Top managed service providers in India cannot risk their or the clients’ data. 

AIOps-led solutions will help MSPs prevent cyberattacks. Since an AIOps-led system will perform 24*7 monitoring, any cyberattack cannot go noticed. If your employees commit malicious activities, they will also be recognised by AIOps. In this era of sophisticated cyberattacks on corporations, you need AIOps to secure your remote workforce. Not to forget, all this will be done with less manual support from MSP employees. Install an AIOps-led system to optimise remote workforce management in 2022!