The state of financial services today spotlights core banking digitization and the bigger-than-life disruption it’s causing in the industry. It makes sense that going to the bank sounds like an errand people no longer need to run. Even though 77 percent of banking consumers still use traditional banks in some capacity, 43 percent keep their funds elsewhere, and 61 percent will likely switch to a digital-only provider, Galileo Financial Technologies found.

We could probably sum up the direction the financial services industry is headed in just two words: digital transformation. It’s the buzzy, all-encompassing focus and end goal of financial services organizations near and far, and it’s the big reason why many organizations are thinking about process automation with a greater sense of urgency.

Gartner®, in its latest Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms released November 2023, followed the company’s track record of research that provides recommendations to industry leaders, showcases market trends, and shares next-level automation insights.

Incident response in a Network Operations Center (NOC) is cumbersome and time-consuming. There are many steps, many sources where incidents come from, and a long, long list of complexities involved. For instance, for incident response with a NOC, there’s the initial monitoring – Tier 1 functions of “eyes on glass” work of looking at alerts coming in and what they’re for, such as a security breach, performance issue, a hardware failure, among others.

It’s safe to assume that planning ahead is everything to business leaders right now, as the start of 2024 is right around the corner. It’s a strategy-backed priority to get proactive and ahead of challenges that might be ahead of us. As IT’s role in driving business success continues to expand, putting automation to work inside of IT departments and functions today better positions organizations to reach goals and overcome future obstacles.

From an IT perspective, technologists generally agree that the ability to monitor and have visibility into the IT stack across every one of their applications is essential with the now-permanent remote and hybrid work models. It also stems from the fact that digital transformation and IT growth has accelerated by seven years since the pandemic in 2020, analysts say.

Network Operations might never be the same. But then again, why would anyone want it to be? The power of automation and orchestration can bring incredible value to the Network Operations Center (NOC), including the business-critical call to get proactive and ahead of the incidence response and management game. It’s more than a towering volume of events – it’s the complexities involved, too.

Chances are, you’re familiar with the strategy of adding an additional “9” to service level agreements (SLAs) to boost the experiences your organization provides. With plenty of ways to do so, there’s one that particularly stands out among the others: Service Blueprinting. Banking executive Lynn Shostack in 1984 first described a service blueprint in a Harvard Business Review publication.