Digital workers are struggling to stay afloat in the sea of information, tools and apps that are part of their workday, according to new research from Gartner. IT departments are struggling to lend a helping hand.
Employees may prefer hybrid or remote work (not a surprise) but, the IT shenanigans that come with a geographically dispersed modern workforce? Maybe not as favored. Probably because, organizations with 250+ employees typically use more than 100 SaaS apps, according to vendor Zscaler.
This is just one of the reasons that the company used artificial intelligence (AI) -powered insights and analysis to build its Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), hoping to provide more transparency into an enterprise’s user experience and offering solutions for performance inefficiencies in today’s workforce, including the help desk folks.
Indeed, rising cloud adoption and hybrid workplaces have put pressure on network operations, service desk and security teams, according to Zscaler, who have seen a 35% increase in support ticket volume, plus a rise of more than 30% in service cost per ticket.
ZDX advancements aim to analyze large amounts of telemetry gathered by “unifying monitoring silos across diverse end-user devices, a user’s local network, ISP and corporate networks, proxies, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange and applications,” wrote Zscaler’s Krishnan Badrinarayanan in a company blog.
Quick IT fixes thanks to AI
A large amount of data is generated in digital-first businesses, complex environments and remote workers’ devices, according to Zscaler. By using AI, IT teams using ZDX can slim troubleshooting processes down to a few minutes, and produce insights that can accelerate troubleshooting with automated root cause analysis and automated alerts using built-in intelligence.
“The new AI-powered root cause analysis takes the guesswork out of organization-wide user experience monitoring and enables advanced troubleshooting capabilities that consolidate siloed monitoring tools,” Dhawal Sharma, vice president and general manager at Zscaler, told Silverlinings via email. “This type of intelligent troubleshooting provides enterprises with dramatic improvements to end-user experience issues that would otherwise waste valuable time and resources.”
‘Digital dexterity’
Currently, ZDX can be used to monitor popular workday apps such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Quality monitoring will extend to Webex with ZDX’s enhancements. Insight functions will also be tweaked, allowing IT teams to produce quarterly business review reports on a monthly or quarterly basis to share team impact with stakeholders, according to the company.
“Zscaler gathers millions of data points to provide unparalleled insights and network visibility to our customers. The new ZDX enhancements offer full visibility into Zero Trust architecture and deployments, where most monitoring tools fall flat due to a lack of inbound connectivity to networks,” Sharma concluded.