The rise in digitization has contributed to the growth and complexity of unstructured data (text, audio, video and more). Users now access data more than ever before, making downtime more impactful to business. So IT teams need to be on guard and nip downtime issues in the bud before they culminate into a much bigger problem.

One efficient way to minimize downtime is to adopt IT operational analytics (ITOA) practices in your enterprise. By deploying ITOA, teams can constantly monitor IT systems to analyze and interpret data from various IT operational sources. This enables them to predict potential service downtime and reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR).

Predictive analytics is a popular ITOA technology that you can leverage to improve your business by leaps and bounds. Predictive analytics analyzes relationships among various data points to predict behavioral trends, growth opportunities and risks, which can add critical value to your business.

Here are a few questions to help you decide if predictive analytics is right for your business.

1. Do you need a better way to tackle application downtime?

By leveraging their data, predictive analytics allows businesses to prevent downtime. Predictive analytics uses adaptive algorithms to analyze existing historical data to observe past and current behavior from applications and networks. The goal of this analysis is to discover any potential problems before they develop.

If there is any deviation between the measured value and standard value, a notification is immediately sent to the IT admin, warning of a potential issue. This enables enterprises to take stock of those issues before they impact customers.

2. Are your customers really happy?

Enterprises often make the mistake of assuming their customers are satisfied. Reality, however, might tell a different story. Applying predictive techniques in your business processes will accurately assess if a customer is happy or disappointed with you and your services.

For instance, by analyzing emails, predictive analytics can illuminate areas related to customer satisfaction and suggest ways to engage customers better. Predictive analytics gives enterprises a competitive edge so they can choose better techniques to promote products and services that will win them more customers.

3. Is your data secure?

With security attacks rampant in the digital world (the WannaCry ransomware attack is a recent example), enterprises should take measures to safeguard their data from any breach. Due to the wide distribution of security attacks, it is rather challenging to estimate the volume and dollar value of the data loss. Leveraging predictive analytics will enable enterprises to identify possible vulnerabilities in their system to determine the probability of such attacks.

4. Are you managing your IT resources efficiently?

Predictive analytics can be used to monitor resource capacity and determine if it needs to be restocked. This will enable teams to make informed investments at the right time and avoid the dangers of running out of IT resources. This is critical as it allows enterprises to scale their infrastructure in accordance with their user growth.

Any enterprise that wishes to take better control of its IT operations — and predict the occurrence of unprecedented downtime — should consider investing in predictive analytics. Predictive analytics aligns an enterprise's technological goals with its business strategy and is in high demand. As predictive analytics takes off, the rising competition will prompt ITOA vendors to differentiate themselves by offering simpler and more affordable solutions, making predictive analytics available to everyone.