Automation

Cyber threats are on the rise across every industry and business size, highlighting the importance of maintaining network compliance for organizations and especially for IT and security teams.

But that's easier said than done, with many industry-specific compliance regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) each with their own set of standards and processes.

The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation efforts that had already been a top priority for businesses industry wide. In early 2020, many organizations were thrust abruptly into survival mode, forced to rapidly support remote work and find new ways to ensure the success of both employees and customers.

Now, we are in a challenging economic climate where technology innovation has once again become critical to help organizations drive continued efficiency and growth right now. Automation increasingly sits front-and-center in these efforts, helping to drive down costs, enhance productivity, and add value across the business. But to work effectively, automation solutions must be deployed as components in the strategic technology landscape, not as quick fix, throwaway tools.

The term 'time is money' is particularly true for law firms. In fact, productivity is critical to their success especially with the growing popularity of fixed-fee billing, where every minute counts against profitability. 

With a finite amount of time and growing workloads, law firms of all sizes need to find better ways to become more efficient and make lawyer’s lives easier. Doing this will not only help them to become more profitable but will also improve the legal experience for both employees and clients.

Automated threats, ranging from account takeover, credit card fraud, web scraping, API abuses, Grinch bots, and DDoS attacks, are a persistent challenge for the eCommerce industry, according to a new report.

Cybersecurity company Imperva has conducted a 12-month analysis of threats targeting the retail industry. A continued barrage of attacks on retailers’ websites, applications, and APIs throughout the year and during peak holiday shopping times is a continued business risk for the retail industry.

As the move toward cloud-native architectures accelerates, the data generated outstrips the ability of current solutions to produce meaningful analytics, according to a new study.

The survey, from software intelligence company Dynatrace, of 1,300 CIOs and senior cloud and IT operations managers in large organizations, shows 71 percent of CIOs say the explosion of data produced by cloud-native technology stacks is beyond human ability to manage.

When you think about process automation, you might naturally think of a company like Amazon. From ordering, to warehouse automation, to delivery, to returns -- end-to-end business processes flow seamlessly, like magic. When you’re building from scratch as a startup, this level of process automation is easier to achieve than if you’re contending with legacy systems.

But today, 70 percent of global companies list legacy modernization as a top strategic business priority. That means automating all of their processes from scratch isn’t always an option. Ripping and replacing legacy systems is disruptive and costly. That’s where process orchestration comes in.

Almost three quarters (73 percent) of senior IT leaders agree that acquiring IT talent has never been harder and 98 percent say attracting IT talent influences their organization's technology investment choices.

The research from MuleSoft also shows that 86 percent of senior IT leaders now say the experience an organization provides its employees and customers is as important as its products and services.

Monitoring of backups has long been a necessary chore for IT professionals, but a report out today shows that new issues are also impacting the category and creating greater challenges.

The study from Bocada, a company which specializes in the automation of backup reporting and monitoring, is based on a survey of over 260 IT professionals. Varied environments and growing data volumes are revealed as a major concern, with securing data across backup applications the most-cited backup management challenge, followed by protecting growing data volume.

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" 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.