Composability is key to a successful hyper-automation strategy
The past two years have been filled with business uncertainty and risk. But for anyone hoping that a post-COVID era would herald a return to business-as-usual, recent months have been a rude awakening. Economic uncertainty is sweeping the Western world, impacting both businesses and consumers. This in turn is driving boardrooms to focus relentlessly on driving greater cost savings and productivity increases across their operations.
Automation is an obvious candidate for achieving both, but existing technology stacks are limiting the speed at which IT teams can harness those capabilities to meet the demands of the business. IT leaders must lead the charge in finding and adopting new strategies to overcome these barriers.
Automation in cybersecurity: Overcoming barriers
"Automation" has become a buzzword in cybersecurity circles. That is not surprising in an environment where security specialists are in short supply and under intense pressure to defend the business against a huge variety of threats from innumerable different sources. Using technology to do at least some of the work seems like a no-brainer. Nevertheless, it seems that organizations are finding it hard to get the right approach to cybersecurity automation.
Threat Quotient conducted research last year that found resources, time and a lack of trust in outcomes are preventing companies from realizing the benefits of automation. In a recent webinar, myself, Nabil Adouani, CEO of Strange Bee and co-founder of The Hive Project, and our Global VP of Threat Intelligence Engineering Chris Jacobs discussed the current state of automation, the expectations around what automation can actually achieve, and what this means for implementation in the real world.
Lack of automation costs enterprises millions
A lack of automation capabilities for managing IT performance costs an average of $46 million a year according to a new study. While 57 percent of organizations see automation as the key enabler for closing the modernization skills gap in managing IT Operations.
The report from research firm Digital Enterprise Journal also reveals a 54 percent increase in cost of one hour of IT service down time since 2019. In addition 68 percent of IT teams' time is spent on tasks that do not contribute to key business outcomes.
Security and automation are top priorities for IT pros
The top three priorities for IT professionals are improving IT security overall (52 percent), increasing IT productivity through automation (33 percent), and migrating to the cloud (32 percent), according to a new report.
A survey of almost 2,000 IT pros from Kaseya also reveals the main three challenges are cybersecurity and data protection (49 percent), insufficient IT budgets and resources to meet demands (29 percent), and legacy systems that hamper growth and innovation (21 percent).
New platform aims to secure 'unmanageable' applications
Shadow IT applications acquired without the knowledge of the IT department present problems for businesses as they can create security holes or may not be compliant with industry standards.
The problem isn't going to go away. Gartner reports that shadow IT spending represents 30 percent to 40 percent of the overall IT outlay in large enterprises.
Partial automation: The key to easing fears and pushing digital transformation
Many enterprises trying to reach the highest levels of digital transformation are facing a problem: they aren’t adopting autonomous operations and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). While more than half (59 percent) of organizations consider themselves digital transformation adopters or even leaders, a mere 15 percent are implementing automated processes at the same level.
This gap is problematic for enterprises striving to be digital leaders. After all, part of digital transformation’s promise is using data to increase agility, maximize emerging opportunities, provide personalized experiences and, importantly, guarantee a business’s apps and digital services are continuously available.
Automation improves employee retention
Whenever automation is discussed there are always concerns around whether it will lead to a need for fewer staff or will cause existing employees to leave.
But a new study from Samsara shows that 95 percent of businesses which have already implemented AI and automation report it has in fact led to increased employee retention.
Demand for automation surges across all areas of business
Demand for automation from business teams has increased over the last two years according to 91 percent of respondents to a new survey.
The study from MuleSoft shows the highest demand for automation comes from research and development (39 percent), administrative/operations (38 percent), customer service (33 percent), and marketing (26 percent).
Mind the gap: Addressing the cybersecurity talent shortage through network automation
Modern network infrastructure and security teams are tasked with managing extremely diverse ecosystems full of products that each require a specialized skill set to operate, optimize, and secure. While network operations teams look to automate repetitive but fundamental tasks across their teams, less than 35 percent of enterprise network activities are automated today. Based on this surprisingly low number, math tells me that there is tremendous upside.
Amidst the ongoing talent shortage and great resignation in IT and security industries, network automation continues to be a seriously overlooked solution that can help mitigate the impact of turnover and skills gaps by enabling staff to execute consistently and effectively, regardless of seniority or experience. Network automation tools are becoming essential to easing burnout among network and systems engineers who are dealing with a complex network environment.
Why automation is the future of incident response [Q&A]
A security breach can lead to serious reputational and legal issues for enterprises. The speed and effectiveness with which they are able to respond to incidents is therefore crucial.
Larry Gagnon, senior vice president, global incident response at eSentire, believes that the way to address this is by greater automation incident response. We talked to him to find out more.
Qualys updates vulnerability management with automated workflows
Security and compliance specialist Qualys is releasing the latest version of its Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response (VMDR) solution with TruRisk, which offers risk-based vulnerability management for insights into an organization's unique risk posture, allowing it to prioritize its most critical threats.
Qualys VMDR 2.0 gives security and IT teams a shared context and the ability to create workflows via drag and drop technology to quickly align and respond to threats.
Automating networks for whatever comes next [Q&A]
Digital transformation and modernization of IT is sweeping across many organizations at the moment. But one aspect that's sometimes neglected is their impact on networks.
How can enterprises scale their networks to cope with change and what part can automation play in the mix? We spoke to Ernest Lefner, chief product officer at Gluware, and co-founder and former co-chairman of ONUG (Open Network User Group), to find out.
Poor alerts hamper effective automation of threat detection
According to a new report 85 percent of IT security professionals have experienced preventable business impacts resulting from insufficient response procedures, while 97 percent say that more accurate alerting would increase their confidence in automating threat response actions.
The State of the Modern SOC report from Deepwatch is based on a survey by Dimensional Research of over 300 security professionals, working at US organizations with 1,000 or more employees.
Why networking technologies remain at the heart of online security [Q&A]
Networks and the internet are reliant on domain name servers, dynamic host control protocol, and IP address management. These three technologies -- grouped together as DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM) -- are central to the way things work but that also makes them a tempting target.
We spoke to Ronan David, chief of strategy at EfficientIP to find out why DDI is so vital to online security and how automation can help with defense.
Data team productivity threatens project success
Although 81 percent of respondents to a new survey say that their data team's overall productivity has improved in the last 12 months, 95 percent of teams are still at or over their capacity.
The study of over 500 US-based data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, enterprise architects and chief data officers by Ascend.io finds automation is emerging as the most promising path to increase data team capacity and productivity.
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