Automation is being seen in more industries and applications than ever, from autonomous cars to virtual assistants, computer vision, fraud prevention and detection, and millions of other applications, robots, and processes. For IT organizations, intelligent operational automation is here - and it deserves close consideration by CIOs based on ROI and an array of compelling reasons.
Accelerating Adoption Of Automation
Since the first automated loom was invented in the mid-18th Century, the world has been sold on automation. Today, artificial intelligence techniques like machine learning and deep learning have given automation greater and more sophisticated capabilities. The race is on to create new software and to augment existing systems to use automated A.I. to deliver new features and analytical insights everywhere.
In healthcare, automated point-of-care decision support systems help determine what tests to order and interpret test results, imaging, and patient histories. One study at a Texas hospital found that automated A.I. systems used for medical record review, order entry, and decision support actually reduced deaths, unnecessary complications, and costs.
Digital automation in smart cities is helping billions of people by optimizing transportation, government services, use of resources, policing, and emergency response.
Increasing Automation In IT
Most IT environments have not yet taken advantage of the automation benefits made possible, affordable, and accessible through automated cloud and A.I. solutions. Manual processes are still the norm. Getting storage systems configured requires updates to storage, compute, and network infrastructure. It can take months of planning to verify interoperability and deploy and integrate new components. Setting up a database takes days, sometimes weeks.
Meanwhile, in the cloud these and other IT resources can be automatically configured and made operational with a few clicks. Automation eliminates all of the lengthy, complex, error-prone, costly, and manual IT processes. Entire IT environments can be automated across hybrid cloud solutions using hyperconverged infrastructure technology to provide a complete, software-defined stack. Such solutions can integrate everything — compute, virtualization, storage, networking, and security — while A.I.-driven automation handles numerous IT operational tasks that were previously manual, expensive, and time-consuming.
Why Care?
Automation is being used in IT for an impressive list of tasks: provisioning, configuration management, orchestration, application deployment, security, and compliance. It is being used across enterprise, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments and is eliminating mundane, manual tasks as well as other jobs of such complexity and scale that they are not humanly possible. With the newest automation solutions and services, IT departments can reduce their manual workload while monitoring their environments on a single screen at a high level of abstraction.
A recent report by Accenture portrays intelligent automation as "the newest recruits to the workforce." The report highlights various examples that show how automation is transforming IT departments. Automation of data analytics is being used to personalize ad experiences and predict what customers will buy. It’s enabling people with no programming experience to deploy complex workflows. Automated A.I. algorithms assisted by machine learning tools are being used to help identify operational issues that could cause applications to go down. Cloud service providers, for example, have deployed features that can be set to trigger an alert if a customer’s server reaches 80% capacity. If this occurs, the system automatically deploys other servers to avoid any downtime.
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