Trend Watch: How does automation evolve in 2022?

IT automation has expanded to include many areas, including infrastructure, application development, security, and non-IT operations. For instance, consider Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots that process bills in finance or resumes in HR. According to Red Hat's 2022 Global Tech Outlook, CIOs' financial priorities are expanding, particularly IT automation. Although security, cloud management, and cloud infrastructure are more popular as individual spending categories, automation is becoming more important in each field.

According to the research, the top specific categories for expenditure on automation include security automation and cloud services automation, for instance. Even though the budget line item doesn't include the phrase "automation," it is, in fact, a financing priority for all projects.

Additionally, this adjustment will take time. It's a long-term tendency. By 2025, for instance, 70% of businesses are expected to have used structured infrastructure automation, up from 20% in 2021. This is a 3.5x increase.

While businesses and people automate jobs and processes for various reasons, the common denominator is typically this: Automation either minimizes onerous (or simply monotonous) work, or it allows capabilities that would otherwise be practically impossible — to do.

Automation has enabled IT and engineering teams to grow and diversify their processes to an extent that was not even imaginable a few years ago. Instead of requiring someone to go into a console and build those environments manually, infrastructure as code, for instance, has allowed us to automate deployments into the cloud.

Automation appears to grow and change simultaneously, whether in terms of underlying technologies, IT strategy, business consequences, or other ways. Here are three new automation-related challenges that will be important to watch in the second half of 2022 and beyond.

Edge computing

Whether seen from an infrastructure POV (consider hybrid cloud and multi-cloud operations), an application architectural POV (consider microservices), a security POV (consider DevSecOps), or nearly any other lens, automation is key to the capacity to grow — rapidly, reliably, and safely — dispersed systems. The secret to making it work is automation.

Therefore, automation will be an essential component of edge computing. Due to the distributed nature of edge architectures and systems, automation is quickly becoming a crucial component of how teams manage those systems.

Applying automation to edge computing as part of a hybrid cloud deployment, which brings computing capabilities closer to consumers and data, is a significant trend in the automation field. To produce better results, a shared automation platform can scale and simplify both edge deployments and the remainder of a hybrid cloud architecture.

Like managing containers at scale, controlling edge nodes at scale is challenging the more you have, making it even more crucial to automate as much operational labor as possible.

When a company has hundreds or thousands of edge nodes, what some may have previously considered a nice-to-have in a small-scale on-prem infrastructure becomes necessary. Scale is at the heart of the edge, so it's crucial to take a strategy that minimizes security concerns while simplifying scaling.

Automation security

Regarding active labor, IT budgets and circles are paying close attention to security automation.

Turning the word around, however, reveals a somewhat different meaning that is also starting to receive some much-needed attention: ensuring the security of the automation itself, including the tooling, code, configurations, and other components.

How much cloud infrastructure is automated is a common and accurate indicator of cloud maturity: Generally, businesses' security posture improves as they move toward automation and away from using human identities to make changes.

However, there is an unfortunate side effect. Because of the increased security and other advantages, some businesses put excessive faith in vendor and machine capabilities and, over time, grow numb to environmental changes, failing to apply the same discipline to visibility and detection. That error can result in overly privileged credentials, vulnerable APIs, and other dangers that result in breaches.

Infrastructure such as code and other forms of automation have many wonderful advantages, but they also transfer risk from people to computers. If handled well, that can be a net-positive change, but as teams increase their automation footprint, this move might need to be more clearly defined.

For instance, serverless and microservices designs are based on APIs’ flexibility and automation. Still, as APIs grow more pervasive in our IT ecosystems, the identities of the machines accessing those APIs become increasingly crucial.

IT automation

Undoubtedly, some of the occupations people do now will disappear due to automation (generally speaking, not only in the IT sector). It has occurred in the past, is occurring right now, and will occur again in the future. Empathetic leaders must address employee security concerns rather than brush them off.

According to the World Economic Forum, automation will eventually create more employment than it will eliminate.

A current example of this phenomenon is IT automation, which benefits IT professionals despite its negative reputation as a job-killer.

Automation is becoming increasingly essential to many IT professions since it touches so many elements of IT. Automation abilities are becoming more and more valuable on the job market, regardless of your unique IT career arc.