Practical Applications of GenAI & Digital Automation for Business & IT

Introduction

Generative AI (“GenAI”) is rapidly transforming how the world’s largest businesses operate by enabling automated data insights and actions across both their IT and business domains. By using GenAI with existing data and software platforms, organizations can:

• Streamline Processes
• Strengthen Security
• Optimize Costs and Unlock Profit

Generative AI technology offers businesses unprecedented opportunities to boost productivity and transform operations. Make no mistake - the race is on for companies to adapt quickly and leverage this powerful technology to stay competitive.

Streamlining Processes to Improve Operations and Service Times

Automating routine and repetitive tasks frees up human resources for more strategic and creative work. These tasks tend to be time-consuming and vulnerable to human error. Examples of such tasks are:

• Data Entry
• Resource Deployment & Configuration
• Reporting
• Customer Service

In most cases this work should be augmented with automation, freeing your team for more innovative and high-impact work. Using automation in your workflows can dramatically improve service times and elevate team health and performance. Using Echelon One, teams use pre-built or user-built commands to handle recurring operations with the click of a button. GenAI integrations are readily available in Echelon One so systems can handle and respond to service tickets, generate reports, and more!

Example 1, Read about our Case Study on improving Managed Service Provider's Operations SLAs.

Hardening Security, Automating Remediation, and Auto-Recovery

Hardening cybersecurity with automation and GenAI is a must. Automation and GenAI are unmatched at handling the following security activity examples: 

• Standards Enforcement with Guardrails
• Event-Driven Response
• Swift & Smooth Recovery Operations

Guardrails are the first line of defense in preventing malicious actors from abusing your services, for example allowing public access to cloud resources. They can prevent unapproved actions, as well as correct non-standard resource configurations automatically. Upon detecting potential abuse, GenAI can form a customized message to the internal worker, providing live feedback on the unapproved behavior and informing Security of what happened.

When evaluating existing IT and cloud landscapes for vulnerabilities, many businesses bring in Cybersecurity Posture Management tools (CSPMs). These tools are great at identifying risks, but tend to rely on outsourcing the remediation to a notification or webhook call; the latter usually forcing the team into building and maintaining complex lambda functions all over the place. Conversely, Echelon One is the ultimate centralized command center to handle any message, and drives action across all your business tools. In the event of a zero-day attack or other disaster, not having automated recovery operations could spell disaster for the entire company. Echelon One empowers your team to execute on all of these capabilities in a simple, flexible, and efficient way!

Example 2, Integrating our AWS IAM Access Keys Manager solution to a GenAI prompt within Echelon One can provide valuable insights on improving key management practices. The generated report provides actionable recommendations for enhancing the security, handling, and rotation of keys.

Cloud FinOps, Cost Optimization, and Waste Elimination At-scale

Gaining visibility into your infrastructure , SaaS, etc costs are a must for understanding where the costs are coming from and how to efficiently reduce and optimize them. FinOps companies exist to breakdown your cloud infrastructure costs in a way that is easy to understand, so teams can see and understand their costs (referred to as "showback").

Looking to significantly reduce cloud and IT expenses with GenAI and automation? Examples of the most impactful actions are: 

• Cost Visibility
• Accountability via Cost Allocation
• Resource Rightsizing
• Waste Cleanup

Tagging resources at-scale provides accountability of costs, and targets the root of the problem. We detail in-depth how Echelon One brings customers the best of both worlds for tagging costs in any cloud in this blog post. After costs have been organized, the logical next step is to enable accountability by posting the monthly charges to the corresponding cost center (referred to "chargeback").

In reducing costs, many companies overlook an important step after moving their IT operations to the cloud: adjusting the amount of computing power they're using (and paying for), or rightsizing their resources. This oversight leads to unexpected costs and frequently causes companies new to the cloud to exceed their budget.

Waste cleanup is an easier concept; if a resource is no longer being used, it should be deleted. Cloud resources tend to be charged on an hourly basis, so even forgotten resources will continue to cost money until they are terminated. Echelon One makes cleanup of old snapshots, servers, and other cloud resources easy to identify and automatically remove according to your company policies!

Example 3, Prompt for a breakdown of your cloud costs for each audience: executives will want to know the highest expenses and what value the cloud is returning, FinOps analysts will want to know the main cost drivers and monthly trends, and the Operations team will want to know how to stop costs from increasing!

Summary

GenAI and automation are stronger together and are being implemented across business domains in the world’s largest companies, driving more efficient operations, hardened cybersecurity postures, huge cost optimizations, and better decision making thereof. We’ve shown how GenAI can take one dataset and break it down into different reports per relevant audience. We’ve also discussed how using these cutting-edge technologies can not only improve your bottom line, but also provide immeasurable benefits to your people and business in the form of more innovation, happier teams, and a healthier organization overall!

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