Why public sector needs AI-powered observability: Cost savings, ROI, and analyst efficiency

Elastic Observability customers saw 243% ROI and $1.2 million in savings over 3 years

By

Leanne Link

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For government and education organizations around the world, facilitating an efficient, reliable customer experience is essential when providing critical services and building trust with stakeholders. As technology infrastructure expands and the IT landscape becomes a complex mix of private cloud, public cloud, and air-gapped environments, the ability to see across all systems and data is challenging yet critical. With an AI-powered observability solution, organizations can strengthen operational resilience by improving real-time visibility, generating AI-powered insights, and detecting and resolving IT issues faster.

This week, Forrester Consulting released the The Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Elastic Observability study, commissioned by Elastic, which quantifies the benefits, costs, and risks that Elastic customers have seen from Elastic Observability. To calculate these numbers, Forrester aggregated the experiences and results from five organizations — including one from public sector — into a single composite organization.

The study found that, based on a three-year, risk-adjusted present value, the composite organization experienced the following quantifiable benefits: 

  • 243% return on investment (ROI) 
  • 85% less time spent monitoring and resolving incidents 
  • 105,000 hours saved by developers with more efficient application deployment
  • 90% increase in data analyst efficiency
  • $1.2 million in savings over three years

In addition to measuring quantifiable benefits, the study also highlights significant qualitative benefits that come from Elastic Observability, such as:

  • Faster and higher quality, data-driven decision making
  • Improved application performance and service quality
  • Improved employee collaboration
  • Improved security and compliance 
  • Better flexibility and scalability

Solving public sector challenges with observability

Forrester asked organizations about the challenges they had been trying to solve with Elastic Observability. Rising to the top of interviewees’ concerns were data silos, data inaccessibility, and legacy IT. Accessible, searchable, actionable data is critical in attaining many public sector goals, from efficient citizen experiences, to operational resilience, to strengthening cybersecurity postures. Being able to have visibility into all data, of all types, from one platform, can solve multiple challenges and use cases.

Data silos: Prior to using Elastic, Forrester noted that the organizations lacked consolidated logging and monitoring data, and information wasn’t accessible to employees who needed it. A vice president of IT noted that before using Elastic, their organization had to “engage up to 10 teams at once to properly identify issues.” This process was often time-consuming as well. Elastic Observability, notes a public sector customer in the study, “is a product that seems to be [at the] front of evolution in observability research. And it’s very easy to orchestrate clusters and upgrade, and lifecycle handling is very easy. I can do something else with my hours.”

Data inaccessibility: The public sector organization interviewed for the study was able to reduce its data storage costs by 75% after moving to Elastic. Using Elastic Searchable Snapshots, the organization can now search data in “cold storage” lower-cost tiers, freeing up costs from having to keep data in more expensive “warm” tiers. The customer noted that “Elastic allows us to be more cost-efficient with storage, and we save time and have the chance to grow.” 

Legacy IT: The composite organization in the Forrester study is able to save $250,000 each year in external and labor costs by moving away from legacy monitoring and logging tools. The organization also saved $915,000 over three years by using Elastic Observability to identify operational inefficiencies and optimize data storage, infrastructure usage, and system performance. 

As public sector organizations are being asked to do more with less — and with operational and maintenance (O&M) consuming large amounts of already-limited budgets — the ability to modernize, enhance, and transform while saving costs can be a significant asset.

For additional data and insights, download the full Forrester Total Economic Impact study.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

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