AI for cloud apps: Masergy’s new AIOps is like a digital fortune teller optimizing your video conferencing

IT investments made in remote work and digital collaboration are largely measured on the success of their application performance. And managing cloud applications just got a lot easier thanks to Masergy’s latest AI innovations which essentially put a “digital fortune teller” inside your network to ensure all your video conferencing and other critical applications get the bandwidth they need. Our new tools can even predict and prevent application outages to improve your user experience and business continuity.

Today, Masergy announced new enhancements to our AIOps feature set, helping IT teams improve cloud app performance, drive efficiencies with IT personnel, and prevent potential network impairments. AIOps stands for AI for IT Operations, and while Masergy’s toolset has been acting as a virtual network analyst since 2019, now it’s automating even more work for IT engineers. AI analytics enriched from traffic flows, applications, and log data offer proactive recommendations for application performance.

“Masergy AIOps demonstrates that AI doesn’t have to be a complex, siloed approach. They embed AI deep into the SD-WAN and SASE platform, so machine learning can anticipate all types of IT challenges and intelligently prevent them—whether they are in networked, application, or multi-cloud environments,” said George Aldea, Product Sales Specialist, AppSmart.

Let’s take a look at the problems Masergy AIOps eliminates and the specific use cases where it can truly revolutionize IT management.

AIOps solves the cloud app performance problem

Nearly half of all IT managers lack the information they need to identify, isolate, and resolve application outages. According to Nemertes Research’s 2020 Enterprise and Customer Engagement Management study, 44% of IT organizations say that they lack the data and insight they need to effectively manage both cloud and on-premises applications.

This issue creates a longer time to repair, because the IT team can’t immediately pinpoint the root cause of the problem. Troubleshooting is cumbersome due to the fact that most enterprise IT infrastructures are a complex web of networks, providers, and cloud environments. As a result, the human brain is no longer the best tool to evaluate cloud app performance. It’s a lot like car repair. In the 1960s, a mechanic could look under the hood of a Ford Mustang and say “it sounds like your carburetor needs adjustment,” but modern repair shops rely on engine code readers with computerized probes to get a lead on the source of the issue. Similarly, we need AI to take the guesswork out of the network and the apps they support.

Introducing the new Masergy AIOps

Like the day the car repair shop received its first code reader, AIOps is poised to forever improve the way the IT teams evaluate and optimize cloud application performance. Masergy’s new capabilities are revolutionary and almost magical in the way they automatically evaluate network configurations and app bandwidth usage, predicting outages and making recommendations to ensure apps perform at acceptable levels.

New AIOps features

Here’s how the “magic” in Masergy’s AIOps works.

Masergy embedded AIOps into our software-defined network years ago, and now it’s embedded in the application layer. That means we have applied AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to optimize cloud apps and video conferencing tools running on our global networks. Now, the AI engine has direct access to more of the data it needs to deliver advanced performance optimization. And because AIOps is included in all Masergy SD-WAN offerings, every client has access to all the machine-learning-based insights and automation benefits:

• Gain deeper insights into applications driving the business: Masergy AIOps keeps a running inventory of all applications in use, providing optimization suggestions and Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics for the most used applications.
• Accelerate application troubleshooting and management: Masergy AIOps automatically observes application service quality and provides insights that isolate and identify the cause of performance degradation. For example, Masergy AIOps can “recognize” that video conferencing degradation is being caused by a spike in IP traffic during an online corporate-wide meeting. AIOps will then alert an IT manager to adjust bandwidth accordingly.
• Make data-driven decisions around resource allocation: Masergy AIOps automatically observes application propensity for bandwidth consumption, helping IT managers intelligently manage application policies and forecast bandwidth and network capacity needs. Propensity analysis greatly simplifies policy planning and traffic management to optimize the available circuit capacity.
• Prevent potential application/site outages and performance degradation: Masergy AIOps automatically evaluates historic patterns of bandwidth consumption, providing predictions, proactive recommendations, and real-time alerts on application bandwidth utilization and network outages — essentially giving the IT administrator a crystal ball to foresee imminent problems. Masergy AIOps “knows” the propensity of a specific app to perform adversely during certain network events. It can “forecast” network outages and predict service issues for locations, circuits, or any applications at that site.

Masergy AIOps: What it does

If all of that still feels a bit like hocus pocus, here’s a simple list of its capabilities:

• Predicts network and app performance and proactively recommends optimizations
• Tracks cloud apps and suggests policies based on each specific app’s performance propensity
• Detects conflicting IP address configurations and suggests solutions
• Monitors and recommends optimal balancing for QoS queues

Masergy AIOps: Not just unique, better than the rest

There are three reasons Masergy does AIOps better than our competitors.

1. More mature algorithm: The first AI-based network intelligence service
   Masergy created the industry’s first AI-based network intelligence service that analyzes the network and makes recommendations to enhance reliability. As a result, we’re uniquely positioned to provide the deepest insights and therefore a more mature AIOps algorithm for our SD-WAN and SASE solutions.
2. A smarter AI engine: AIOps built on 20 years of data
   AIOps is only as “smart” as the data it is fed, and Masergy leverages 20 years of network and security logs giving our AI engine an unprecedented amount of historic data patterns to draw from. So, our clients and their AI engines aren’t starting from scratch.
3. AI made easy: The only AIOps solution that’s native to SD-WAN/SASE
   Masergy provides the only AIOps solution that is native to the network and security platform offering prediction and propensity features. We deeply embedded AIOps into the network, security, and application layers. And we remain the only SD-WAN and SASE provider with a fully integrated AI-based network, security and application optimization solution. This way, our clients don’t have to purchase AIOps as a standalone solution and worry about integrating everything. AIOps is already built in and the insights are right where they should be–in the unified portal with all the rest of your network and application data.

If you haven’t heard already, Masergy is on the path to delivering the autonomous networks of the future, and AIOps is the key technology taking us there. These enhancements are just the latest stepping stones in our journey toward full autonomy. Every client that joins us now will be that much more experienced at using AI to successfully automate IT operations when “self-managing” networks arrive–and it won’t be long before they’re here!