Table of Content
- Continuous deployment and delivery
- Application programming interface
- Security
- Bots and personal assistants
- Artificial Intelligence and proactive automation
- Conclusion
Almost every IT Pro is doing some kind of automation. This is because automation helps to be consistent, efficient and avoids making mistakes. The IT industry is continuously changing and this is affecting the way we automate. But how will we automate in the year 2020? In this blog post, I will share my perspective of automation in 2020.
Continuous deployment and delivery
The continuous deployment and delivery approaches are widely adopted by various software vendors. Also, Microsoft is adopting this with Windows 10 and other solutions. This approach allows vendors to release new features and improvements in a more frequent pattern. IT Pro’s have to deal with this continuous stream of new functionalities for operating systems and applications. Manual applying all those updates, upgrades or migrations is not achievable, so automation is key! The continuous re-deployment of your infrastructure is the new way to keep up with all these changes.
Application programming interface
The application programming interface (API) is already very common in modern applications. This will only be more in 2020 as more applications are moving to a modern technology stack and will result in more applications hosted in the cloud. But how are all those dependencies with other services handled? As IT Pro’s we are combining services and enabling integration and therefore these API’s are going to be very important in 2020.
Security
The importance of security is not going to change but will affect the way how we automate. Moving data from and to the cloud needs to be done in a secure way and may not be lost or intercepted. Today security can withhold us to achieve our goals with automation. In 2020 security is going to be easier to adopt in our automation but will continue to change to challenge the bad guys. As IT Pro’s we need to grow a wide understanding of the various authentication methods and security standards so we can guarantee the automation is running is a secure way.
Bots and personal assistants
Bots and personal assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Home will help us even more in 2020. These human interacting interfaces will be the new style for executing the tasks or to find information. By using normal sentences we can ask the bot to provide us information spread out over multiple resources. You already see virtual agents taking over the service desk. This is an efficient way to handle many tickets and frees up staff to focus on other tasks. As IT Pro’s we will be responsible to enable these bots and personal assistants by providing the right resources and learn from the data generated by them.
Artificial Intelligence and proactive automation
Artificial Intelligence is becoming more accessible every day. Microsoft is offering various services which enable us to leverage these techniques. In 2020 there will be a bigger dependency on AI to automatically adapt to the continuous change in our automation. Automation that we adapt on what is happening in the infrastructure without any human interaction. Improvement to run more efficient or finding an another way to solve the occurring issues. This can also lead to proactive automation where personal assistance is reaching out to run a specific task. In 2020 bots will send you a message like: “Hey Ryan, I already know you are going to forget to submit your hours, shall I do it for you?”.
Conclusion
Automation in 2020 will be from cloud services to cloud services executed by bots which are proactively reaching out to apply optimisations learned by AI. This may be extreme but I think it’s closer than you think. What do you think? Please share your thoughts about automation in 2020 in the comments below.
Photo by Ramón Salinero on Unsplash
