Most routine IT operations will soon be handled autonomously

Companies can’t afford downtime. Employees need access to their applications and data 24/7, and so do other business applications, manufacturing and logistics management systems, and security monitoring centers. Anyone who thinks that the brute force effort of their hard-working IT administrators is enough to prevent system downtime just isn’t facing reality.

Traditional systems administrators and their admin tools can’t keep up with the complexity inherent in any modern enterprise. A recent survey of the Oracle Applications Users Group has found that despite significant progress in systems management automation, many customers still report that more than 80% of IT issues are first discovered and reported by users. The number of applications is spiraling up, while data increases at an even more rapid rate.

The boundaries between systems are growing more complex, especially with cloud-based and hybrid-cloud architectures. That reality is why Oracle, after analyzing a survey of its industry-leading customers, recently predicted that by 2020, more than 80% of application infrastructure operations will be managed autonomously.

Autonomously is an important word here. It means not only doing mundane day-to-day tasks including monitoring, tuning, troubleshooting, and applying fixes automatically, but also detecting and rapidly resolving issues. Even when it comes to the most complex problems, machines can simplify the analysis—sifting through the millions of possibilities to present simpler scenarios, to which people then can apply their expertise and judgment of what action to take.

Oracle asked, about the kind of activities that IT system administrators do. That includes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis—things such as password resets, system reboots, software patches, and the like.

Expect that IT teams will soon reduce by several orders of magnitude the number of situations like those that need manual intervention. If an organization typically has 20,000 human-managed interventions per year, humans will need to touch only 20. The rest will be handled through systems that can apply automation combined with machine learning, which can analyze patterns and react faster than human admins to enable preventive maintenance, performance optimization, and problem resolution.

Read more in my article for Forbes, “Prediction: 80% of Routine IT Operations Will Soon Be Solved Autonomously.”