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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you’re a college student and you’ve placed an online food service order, and let’s be honest, that pretty much covers all college students; the chances are high that the delivery was aided and abetted by robot technology. The future has arrived, and even though we’re still waiting for those Jetson’s-promised flying cars, robot foodservice delivery is here.

Robots numbering in the hundreds are buzzing about college campuses and some selected cities in the U.S., U.K., and beyond. The testing, which began pre-pandemic, went into immediate overdrive to fill in the gaps created by the labor shortages and need for social distancing created by Covid-19.

New research from service orchestration and automation solutions company Stonebranch finds 88 percent of enterprises intend to grow their investment in these technologies this year.

The report is based on a survey of respondents from companies with over 1000 employees to find their views about automation and orchestration as it relates to cloud, data pipelines, IT operations, self-service enablement, and more.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been around longer than you might realize. At its core, RPA simply means the automation of any manually intensive IT or administrative task. For instance, scheduling an email is one early example of RPA. But over the last two years, RPA has become much easier to use and the tools have been democratized out to the business units so arduous daily tasks may now be automated easily. Think of it as a highly evolved Excel macro, created by someone in the business that automatically logs into and out of applications to make the enterprise more effective and efficient.

What's more, due to the lack of resources available, automating enterprise processes traditionally caused friction between business units and IT. Today, IT teams may focus on large, transformative automation (e.g., new ERP Systems, new services) and push everything else back over to other business units. Transforming an organization by allowing business units to accomplish more on their own -- while freeing up IT to focus on more complex and important tasks is a far more effective use of all resources. 

According to a new study from integration and API specialist MuleSoft 70 percent of organizations struggle to provide completely connected user experiences across all channels.

This is despite the fact that almost three-quarters (72 percent) of organizations' customer interactions are now digital.

We none of us particularly like handing over money, and that applies equally to businesses and individuals.

Payments are essential to the commercial world, up to now though they've always been a quite labor intensive to process. But what if it could be automated? Would you feel comfortable handing over control of payments to AI?

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many enterprises turned their attention to digital transformation projects. But a talent shortage has held things back, leading many to consider automation as a way to alleviate the burden today's organizations are experiencing.

We spoke to Charlie Newark-French, chief operating officer of human centered automation company Hyperscience, to find out more about the balance between humanity and AI, automation's role in the digital enterprise, and automation's role in digital transformation.

Customer service bots, digital payroll workflows, fleet management and lest we forget the clever programmer who famously automated his own job -- the uses for and adoption of automation continues to expand. In fact, the automation market is expected to reach $136.5 billion by 2026 with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.7 percent according to Industry ARC’s Automation Market Report.

But as growth and excitement build, confusion in the market also abounds. After all, the word "automation" is so overused and broad that it’s no longer descriptive.