The needs of multinational healthcare operations have outpaced the capacities of homegrown IT systems. Flexible AI-powered SaaS IT service and asset management, on the other hand, excels on a global scale.
If you’re the CIO or CTO of a transnational healthcare or life sciences enterprise that employs around 10,000 workers around the world, you want to know if your IT system is in danger of crashing – even if the alarm sounds in the middle of the night. While you’re fast asleep, a team or operation on the other side of the globe could be running a major application that’s about to trigger a costly work stoppage if it runs out of server space.
In this scenario, you want to be ready – no matter the circumstances – to call mission-critical staff, trigger redundancy programs, and enact disaster recovery protocols before production or distribution slows. Even better, you want all those actions to happen automatically as soon as you’ve verified the threat.
Clearly, IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) for organizations and companies with global operations have to be nimble in order to deal with the constant flux of conditions that they face today. Fortunately, thanks to AI, they can be.
AI exponentially increases the flexibility of ITSM and ITAM, futureproofing against threats and shutdowns with scalable automated service request fulfillment, incident remediation, resource provisioning, and other innovations. For multinational corporations, this means a lot more efficiency and a lot less vulnerability.
Too much of a good thing
Healthcare institutions and organizations that maintain home-grown IT management solutions have certainly been rewarded with enhanced control and flexibility. But those benefits can also become too much of a good thing. In today’s globalized healthcare world, control obtained via centering all IT services in one location results in vulnerability. Too much flexibility, however, means too many tentacles going their own way, doing their own thing — a management nightmare and security risk, to boot.
Meanwhile, for a global team, home-grown solutions often don’t scale or transition easily to other facilities, especially newly acquired facilities, so different parts of the organization are on different pages. The result of this is a global enterprise or institution that is held back from growing to its full potential because of a lack of coordination and missed opportunities in ITSM and ITAM.
Lacking visibility
Consider this: about 50 percent of enterprise leaders said that up to half of their business applications and platforms are SaaS, according to the 2021 State of SaaS Management survey. However, 59 percent of those leaders said they “lacked visibility” into those tools while almost half said they spent too much time manually managing apps.
That situation leads to security vulnerabilities, a new survey from the Cloud Security Alliance reported. As a result, 43 percent said they had experienced a security breach because of issues relating to a lack of visibility and widespread access to security settings within SaaS apps, the survey said. Meanwhile, investment in business-critical SaaS apps is outpacing SaaS security tools and staff even as only 26 percent are performing automated security reviews after a security incident.
Down with silos
Before the pandemic, healthcare organizations and businesses began initiating digital transformations, a process that accelerated after 2020. That means that enterprise leaders are trying to move away from silos, unifying people, processes, and data in the institution or company.
A large part of this transformation is a unified platform that handles ITSM and ITAM, a platform that is accessible across the entire team, from headquarters in country X to sister operations or subsidiaries in countries Y and Z. That’s the way to ensure even management and proper scaling.
Meanwhile, managing tech assets spread across state lines or across the world in multi-cloud environments is no mean feat and necessitates onboarding, monitoring, and updating those devices. That’s a tall order, one that most legacy on-premise systems can’t fill.
Holding back innovation
These days, enterprise leaders don’t want to be dependent on a shared inbox to handle alerts, a remarkably common tool for companies using homegrown IT systems today. They don’t want an old homegrown solution straining to keep up with increased demand. And they definitely don’t want to compound problems by allowing vulnerabilities to disruptions stemming from abrupt remote and virtual workforce changes, supply chain snarls, key personnel departing amid the Great Resignation, and other challenges.
But that situation is occurring at enterprises these days, with on-site systems holding back digital innovation, especially in global enterprises.
A transition to a unified IT service and asset management system, powered by AI, would liberate innovation and promote operational efficiency because it would be able to handle all of those key tasks, keeping watch for threats, and updating across the organization’s departments no matter where they are.
It would promote savings and growth, too. The SaaS aspect of out-of-the-box IT solutions allows companies to manage the scope and scale of their enterprise services, including adding and removing features so they don’t wind up paying for more tools than they need. Instead, they can tailor their ITSM and ITAM systems to the unique needs of their businesses.
Best of all, these solutions promote better business decisions: For example, 94 percent of IT directors said reactive, manual methods like spreadsheets put them at risk of missing key information that would help make better business decisions.
The end result is more efficiency and productivity with the ancillary benefit of uninterrupted sleep.
