Three major automation trends that enterprises need to pay attention to

IT automation has become a broad-based technology category that covers everything from infrastructure to application development, security and non-IT functions. For example, a robotic process automation (RPA) robot processes invoices in the finance department or picks resumes in the human resources department.

In other words: automation is everywhere.

According to a 2022 Global Technology Outlook report recently released by Red Hat, IT automation budgets continue to grow as a priority for chief information officers. While IT automation and security, cloud management, and cloud infrastructure are all listed as important spending items, in reality, automation is playing an increasingly important role in each of these areas.

The report further states that, for example, security automation and cloud computing service automation are listed as the main areas of automation spending. Automation is actually a funding priority across the board, even if its budget line item doesn't actually use that term.

This is not a short-term adjustment. This is a permanent trend because now anything can be considered “permanent”. According to Gartner's forecast, 70% of enterprises will implement structured infrastructure automation by 2025, which will be 3.5 times the number in 2021.

While businesses and individuals automate tasks and processes for a variety of reasons, the common denominator is often this: automating either painful (or just plain boring) work or enabling impossible functionality. Or both.

Anusha Iyer, co-founder and chief technology officer of Corsha, said, “Automation helps IT and engineering teams take their processes to the next level and achieve scale that was not possible just a few years ago. and diversity. For example, infrastructure as code allows us to automate deployments in the cloud, rather than requiring humans to log into a console and create these environments.”

Three emerging automation issues worth paying attention to

Just as the use of automation continues to increase, so too does it change – whether in the underlying technology, IT strategy, business impact, or other aspects. Here are three emerging automation trends to watch in the second half of 2022 and beyond.

(1) Edge computing scale depends on automation

Automation is critical to the ability to scale distributed systems quickly, reliably and securely, both from an infrastructure perspective (such as hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud operations), an application architecture perspective (e.g. microservices), a security perspective (e.g. DevSecOps), or from any other perspective. Automation is key to making it work.

Therefore, automation will become the foundation of edge computing. Edge architectures and systems are by definition distributed, and automation is becoming a critical part of how IT teams actually operate these systems.

Gordon Haff, technology evangelist at Red Hat, said, “An important trend in automation is its application to edge computing as part of hybrid cloud deployments, bringing computing power closer to users and data. And a universal Automation platforms can scale and simplify edge deployments and the rest of the hybrid cloud architecture to deliver better results."

Managing edge nodes at scale is a bit like managing containers at scale, in the sense that having The more there are, the harder it is to manage. Therefore, it becomes even more important to automate as much operational work as possible.

Haff said, “When an enterprise has hundreds or thousands of edge nodes, what some may have once considered having in a small on-premises infrastructure becomes essential, edge computing fundamentally It’s all about scale, so it’s important to adopt an approach that makes scalability easy and reduces security risks.”

(2) Security automation will meet automation security

said Operations, security automation is getting a lot of attention in the IT world and IT budgets.

But if you turn that phrase around, automation security actually means something different, and it's also starting to get some needed attention: ensuring the security of automation itself, from the tools to the code to the configuration. and other components.

Permiso Vice President Ian Ahl pointed out that cloud computing maturity is usually measured by the degree of automation of its cloud infrastructure management. He said, "Generally speaking, we find that as enterprises move toward automation and away from human identity modification, their security posture increases."

But Ahl added that there is an unfortunate side effect: due to With increased security and other benefits, some enterprises place too much trust in the capabilities of machines or vendors and become desensitized to changes in their environment over time. They do not have the same stringent requirements for visibility and detection.

This is a bug that can lead to over-privileged credentials, leaked APIs, and other risks leading to breaches.

Corsha’s Iyer similarly noted that while infrastructure as code and other types of automation bring huge benefits, it shifts risk from people to machines. This can be a positive if managed correctly, but as teams expand their automation footprint, this shift may require greater focus.

Iyer said, “For example, serverless and microservices architectures are built on the flexibility and automation provided by APIs, but the more APIs become an integral part of the IT ecosystem, the identity of the machines accessing those APIs becomes more important.” The more important.”

(3)IT automation is a career booster, not a job killer

What is certain is that automation (broadly speaking, not limited to IT) will eliminate the some jobs. Empathetic leaders need to address concerns about job security rather than ignore them.

But automation is also creating new jobs, and ultimately it will eliminate more jobs, according to estimates from the World Economic Forum.

IT automation is a great example of this happening phenomenon: Although automation is a job killer, it has real benefits for IT careers.

As automation permeates many aspects of IT, it is increasingly becoming an integral part of many IT jobs. The above introduces three automation-centric roles that are in particularly high demand right now. Regardless of one's specific IT career, automation skills are increasingly advantageous in the job market.

The goal, as infrastructure leaders like to say, is to get rid of the grunt work and automate it so you can keep moving forward and growing," Iyer said.

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