2020 is the year of HyperAutomation. Are your IT & Security teams ready?
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel–exceptthis new Gartner reportsays it’s actually this year’s leading tech trend: hyperautomation.
Hyperautomation is the next iteration of acombination of tools: robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent business management software (iBPMS), AI, and machine learning (ML). Together, they fill in for human workers and take over repetitive tasks.
According to Gartner, hyperautomation will soon offer real-time continuous organizational intelligence, “driving significant business opportunities.” While it’s not quite here yet, it will potentiallyturbocharge almost every aspect of your business, from CRM to HR to finance and beyond.
And what about cybersecurity? Are we going to see an army of virtual sentries in the near future patrolling our organizations’ boundaries and internal networks, keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior of all kinds?
The truth is, hyperautomation is almost here. Is your business ready?
So far, 2020 has done a great job of highlighting the pressure we’re all under to get the job done when it comes to IT and information security.
Every organization has spent this year scrambling to do more with less–less infrastructure, fewer team members–and supporting off-site workers on a vast range of platforms. Everyone’s struggling to be more efficient, and hyperautomation seems like the perfect answer.
Even before COVID-19, there were challenges, with factors like regulatory compliance creating a constant stream of more and bigger data to track as well as introducing more potential sources of vulnerability for hackers to prey on.
As professionals in IT and Security, you know these are unique times, with every department member pushed to the limit.
Everybody fantasizes about handing routine tasks over to robots that will obediently take care of them all. But just like with the first generations of robotic vacuum cleaners, which didn’t live up to the hype, we’re not quite there yet.
There’s a lot of creative thinking going on, and not every brilliant idea will ultimately succeed in practical terms, but the trend toward finding ways to automate will ultimately help us optimize manual processes of all kinds. It will save time, make processes smoother, and maybe compensate for the inevitable human mistakes when faced with repetitive tasks.
But there are always going to be tasks that need a human behind the wheel. Think about self-driving cars. Given that 94% of accidents are caused by human error,according to the US Department of Transportation, an autonomous car might be safer in many ways. But today’s sensor technology isonly about a tenth as goodas humans at predicting pedestrian actions.
The message? Any robot can drive a car—but only a human being can make eye contact and predict whether that woman standing on the curb will step out into traffic or stay back safely.
There is a definite rise in automation across almost all industries.
