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Enabling Digital Resiliency Through Data Fabric and AI: Looking into CloudFabrix

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Businesses today are grappling with massive complexity in their technology environments. With distributed footprints across cloud, edge and data centers, dependence on countless applications, and data flooding in from diverse monitoring tools, managing IT has become exceptionally challenging. When critical systems fail, the impact can directly hit revenue and reputation.

During the recent 53rd IT Press Tour, VMblog had the opportunity to get exposed to a company addressing these very challenges head on, CloudFabrix.

CloudFabrix offers innovative data fabric and AIOps solutions to help enterprises master complexity and achieve true digital resilience. The company consolidates data from across environments and applies artificial intelligence to deliver unified visibility, accelerated insights and increased automation.

"Our aim is to give enterprises the ability to see how we are allocating resources for IT operations, how effectively we are leveraging and using that for IT operations," stated Shailesh Manjrekar, Chief Marketing Officer at CloudFabrix.

The CloudFabrix Journey

CloudFabrix was founded in 2016, by executives with over 19 years building data center, cloud and analytics startups. Their past companies have powered solutions leveraged by hundreds of enterprise customers.

"We made an impact in the industry with different technology companies... technologies still being used by hundreds of customers, enterprise customers," said Manjrekar.

The founding team brought deep expertise in areas like data collection, dependency mapping and operations analytics. They saw an opportunity to combine these capabilities to solve the digital resilience challenge enterprises were facing.

Their vision was to provide a horizontally scalable data fabric that could ingest monitoring data from across complex environments. This data would fuel advanced AIOps solutions leveraging clustering, regression modeling and other techniques to accelerate root cause analysis and remediation.

CloudFabrix would also differentiate itself through cutting-edge AI capabilities like real-time topology mapping, conversational interfaces and closed-loop automation.

"Our starting point was IT operations analytics and building on top of that," explained Manjrekar.

The Need for Digital Resiliency

In today's digital world, applications have become the "digital storefronts" for businesses. If these applications go down, revenue is directly impacted. Providing digital resiliency has become a business imperative.

However, modern IT environments present many challenges:

  • Complex, distributed systems spanning cloud, edge and data centers
  • Islands of data across monitoring tools providing limited insights
  • Flood of noisy alerts obscuring real issues
  • Length incident response times averaging 7+ hours
  • This results in significant business disruption and revenue loss. The average cost of downtime can exceed $400,000 per incident.

CloudFabrix's Data Fabric and AIOps Solutions

To address these pressing IT ops challenges, CloudFabrix provides an intelligent data fabric plus AIOps solutions leveraging capabilities like:

  • Real-time Topology Mapping - Automatically discovers and maps dependencies between applications, infrastructure and network components across cloud and data centers.
  • Log, Metric and Traces Correlation - Collects, normalizes and correlates data from diverse monitoring tools to provide unified visibility.
  • Incident Management Analytics - Leverages clustering, regression analysis and predictive capabilities to reduce noise and accelerate root cause identification.
  • Conversational AI Assistance - Allows users to ask questions in plain language and get automated insights and recommendations through the company's self-learning platform called "Macaw".
  • Closed-loop Remediation - Translates identified issues into appropriate auto-remediation actions across tools. 

Data Fabric Enables Broad Data Consolidation

The keystone enabling CloudFabrix's AIOps solutions is its intelligent data fabric. This performs high-speed ingestion from thousands of monitoring data sources, transforms the data for analysis, and routes it flexibly between storage platforms.

This enables the consolidation of metrics, logs, traces and events from all vendors and custom applications across public cloud, private cloud and legacy systems onto a single platform. According to Manjrekar, pulling this data together is critical to overcoming visibility gaps:

"It became the number one priority for IT executives. They have to consolidate, otherwise it will cause bigger problems."

Architecturally, the data fabric utilizes an event streaming approach rather than traditional extract-load models. It elastically scales to handle over 1 million events per second.

The company's vast library of 1,000+ purpose-built "bots" rapidly connects new data sources. It also offers telemetry pipelines supporting both standard OpenTelemetry APIs as well as custom protocols. This allows ingestion from every component in an enterprise stack.

"Any protocol, any data source - our aim is to modernize everything into a consistent data format," noted Manjrekhar.

Advanced Analytics & AI for Actionable Insights

With monitoring data aggregated and prepared, CloudFabrix applies techniques like visual mapping of dependencies, correlation of cross-domain events, anomaly detection and predictive analytics. This detects critical threats and service degradations early with greater accuracy.

The company connects incident tickets across ITSM platforms to support efficient collaboration. It also provides pre-built reporting dashboards that can be tailored to each user's operational domain - whether networking, cloud platform or applications.

CloudFabrix differentiates itself by infusing AI throughout its platform, achieving operational insights unfeasible through manual methods alone:

  • Generative AI - Its self-learning Macaw interface allows users to ask freeform questions in plain business language and receive automated responses. This delivers the same visibility with a fraction of manual effort.
  • Intent Driven Automation - Users can trigger automated workflows aligned with operational objectives. The platform maps user intents to appropriate tools and response sequences using historical data.
"We are addressing the problems by using our data fabric and AI solutions," stated Manjrekar.

Helping Leading Enterprises Achieve Digital Resilience

With its AI-augmented solution, CloudFabrix enables customers to master exponential complexity, accelerate response times and maximize application availability. Benefits include:
  • 60%+ faster insights from deluge of monitoring alerts
  • 30-50% lower tooling costs through platform consolidation
  • 99.95%+ application uptime ensuring excellent user experience
  • Millions in yearly revenue savings from avoiding business disruption

The platform serves various vertical use cases - from pinpointing network faults causing payment transaction losses, to detecting abnormal resource utilization spikes impacting trade processing throughput.

CloudFabrix already counts leading global telcos, retailers, healthcare networks and government agencies as clients. Partners like IBM and Cisco embed the company's technology to augment their offerings. One partner estimated a $250 million addressable pipeline for solutions built with CloudFabrix.

"We have significant customer momentum... there has been a hockey stick growth curve over the past year," commented Manjrekar.

Ongoing Innovation to Democratize AIOps

CloudFabrix continues innovating across AI, automation and multi-cloud capabilities to further simplify IT operations.

Its conversational interface means any employee can access operational insights on-demand through natural language - democratizing benefits beyond expert engineers. The platform also auto-documents workflows launched by users for auditability.

By integrating with IT process automation tools, the company aims to enable closed-loop remediation triggered by alerts meeting defined conditions. This will limit manual effort needed to execute routine responses like instance recycles or traffic shifts.

As enterprises navigate exponential IT complexity, CloudFabrix's AI-powered solutions offer a path towards true resilience - where technology enables rather than hinders the business. With capabilities to unify visibility, accelerate response and automate remediation across heterogeneous global footprints, the company is poised to become an indispensable partner enabling digital progress.

CloudFabrix's innovative data fabric and applied AI empowers enterprises to achieve digital resilience amidst an environment of soaring complexity. By making the right data available for algorithms to rapidly glean insights and trigger actions, CloudFabrix allows companies to maximize application availability and focus on their core business goals rather than firefighting technology issues. With large advanced clients across sectors and growing partnerships with leaders like Cisco and IBM, the company is primed to build on its early traction. As enterprises look to harness AI for managing next-generation multi-cloud architectures, CloudFabrix brings differentiated capabilities that promise to shape the future of AIOps.

Published Friday, February 02, 2024 4:00 PM by David Marshall
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