A peek into the next level of automation

• Once they cross the transformation threshold, automation will become increasingly essential to chief information officers’ quest for higher efficiency at lower costs.
  
• Gartner’s report predicts that by 2025, 95% of all digital initiatives will be on cloud-native platforms.
  
• The next big leverage for automation by 2025 will be its use in cyber security.

Automation, while being much maligned in B2C sectors, is fast becoming the Holy Grail of B2B enterprise technology adoption. The immediate reason is the rapid digitization that almost all verticals underwent in the last two years, which accelerated their earlier plans of digital transformation – primarily fueled by artificial intelligence (AI), automation, the cloud, and machine learning (ML).

However, in this endeavour, as a first step, enterprises would see only a base level of automation adoption. Once they cross the transformation threshold, automation will become increasingly essential to chief information officers’ (CIOs) quest for higher efficiency at lower costs. Historically, its adoption was focused on operations and production (or manufacturing) teams. The DataOps, DevOps and CloudOps teams were the early adopters of automation to deliver on efficiency and agility, not to mention accuracy.

For the next few years, the adoption of cloud platforms will increase manifold, to enable successful digital transformation. Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022: Cloud-Native Platforms report predicts that by 2025, 95 % of all digital initiatives will be on cloud-native platforms. The number will have more than doubled from 2021 (40%). This increase will be fueled by advanced IT automation solutions that will help to orchestrate and control their workloads.

While this adoption increases, the next step for automation is Service Orchestration And Automation Platform (SOAP), which will take the lead in offering numerous advantages over the current workload automation solutions. SOAP will deliver the ability to automate real-time business models in the cloud, assuring business-focused digital agility and innovation. Gartner’s report predicts that these advantages will drive 80% of workload automation users to SOAP in the next 2 years.

Over the next two to three years, IT tasks and jobs will also become increasingly automated, and business end-users will have to empower self-service capabilities.

The next big leverage for automation by 2025 will be its use in cyber security. Hybrid work practices have pushed security risks into homes and distributed geographies. The solution over the next year would be a cybersecurity mesh - designed to reduce the financial impact of a cyber incident drastically by establishing boundaries around individual devices, instead of the network. Automation will play a critical role in this cyber-security strategy since it is impossible to establish manual security boundaries on devices.

Data is the basis of all digitization, but raw data is of no value to any process. With increasing data and increasingly more complex data analytics, the ability to analyse it and convert it into actionable insights cannot be a manual process. Complex data pipelines will need resilient automation platforms to serve as what has been referred to as, meta-orchestrator automation platforms.

The trend for the adoption of automation platforms for the next five years points directly to one thing- its ability to handle complex IT systems and managing the complete IT workflow from a single, centralised platform with a unified view.

Beyond this, it will be hyper-automation – the ability of automation platforms to handle several disparate automation platforms that address complexities in various IT processes of the enterprise, or one ‘Boss Platform’ to rule all.
SEE ALSO:
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman reveals government is investigating multiple Chinese smartphone makers for tax evasion
‘Cloud migration, digital transformation don’t always help with innovation blockers’