AI-powered automation done right

The power of automation is its ability to simplify complex tasks, giving employees back valuable time to focus on strategic priorities and innovation.

Now generative AI is supercharging automation. Among executives who are leaders in generative AI adoption, nearly 9 in 10 say that the technology helps them execute more high-impact automation initiatives, according to research by the IBM Institute for Business Value.

Over the last four years, we’ve focused on what it takes for our clients to reap the benefits of automation across their enterprises. A successful approach depends on accessing the right set of tools to power automation in applications, IT and infrastructure.

An automation toolset should include the following capabilities:

1. Observability: A high-quality automated observability tool provides real-time data on applications and IT infrastructure, such as dependencies between components, erroneous call rates and latency so that organizations can quickly identify and address issues before they grow into larger problems.
   
   
2. Resource optimization: An application resource management solution can dynamically allocate resources to boost efficiency and prevent downtime.
   
   
3. Resilience enablement: A generative AI-driven solution can evaluate the health of applications and provide recommendations to mitigate operational risk and improve resilience.
   
   
4. Cost management: Technology financial management products can help organizations be cost-effective in managing infrastructure and resources wherever they’re based.
   
   
5. Automated infrastructure management: Automation facilitates infrastructure management at scale, which will be vital as generative AI makes developing applications faster and easier. As developers deploy generative AI for code and test case generation to create more apps, automated infrastructure management can ensure they have the infrastructure necessary to support their innovation.
   
   
6. Secrets management: Automated authentication and authorization access helps ensure only the right people can access an organization’s sensitive data.

At IBM, we’ve invested in these capabilities through both in-house development and acquisitions so we can better serve our clients as they deploy automation in hybrid cloud environments.

Most enterprises aren’t content to confine their workloads to a single location. They want to run automation in multiple places, including in different clouds and on premises. About 7 in 10 organizations are working with hybrid cloud strategies, with workloads in at least one public cloud and one private cloud.

For this reason, enterprises should ensure that they’re adopting automation tools that work for hybrid environments. For example:

• A cost management tool should be able to help enterprises maximize ROI in their technology investments both on premises and on different clouds.
  
  
• A resiliency solution should elevate an organization’s resiliency posture on any hyperscaler and behind a firewall.
  
  
• An automated infrastructure management solution should enable the provisioning of infrastructure across clouds and on premises.

The dynamic growth of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has spurred a rising interest in infrastructure automation. 

IaC uses a high-level descriptive coding language for infrastructure provisioning, enabling developers to access fully documented, versioned infrastructure by executing a script. It’s an exponential improvement over the manual way of doing things, which entailed managing multiple infrastructure elements, like operating systems, servers and database connections. With the right IaC solution, developers can deploy their applications or code on any hyperscaler, but they need to ensure proper safeguards are in place.

An effective secrets management solution protects credentials used by apps and servers. It can detect and prevent unauthorized access to and misuse of sensitive data and systems, allowing developers to work securely in a range of environments. The combination of IaC and secrets management, deployed in a hybrid cloud environment, sets the stage for even greater innovation and productivity. 

IBM has invested in several automation capabilities to address infrastructure automation and secrets management, most notably, HashiCorp. HashiCorp’s Terraform and Vault, respectively, are premier solutions for infrastructure and secrets management in hybrid-cloud environments. 

When enterprises work with multiple vendors on adopting different products, they are forced to invest time in ensuring the solutions are compatible with each other. Their employees end up spending more time training on the different products and maintaining them. 

In contrast, when enterprises work with a single vendor, there is a smoother integration of different products, resulting in less training and maintenance work for employees. This holds true for automation vendors and products.

At IBM, we’ve brought different automation capabilities together so that our clients can benefit from a one-stop shop for their automation needs.

For example, through our observability solution, Instana, and our resource optimization solution, Turbonomic, we helped an IT agency speed up resourcing decisions by 70% and reduce licensing costs for its VMware environment by 30%. The agency’s head of distribution told us that the combination of the two solutions “took the stress out of application performance management.” In other words, the solutions made their work simpler. 

With the addition of HashiCorp’s tools to our automation portfolio, our clients will see even more opportunities to automate and reduce the complexity of their work. We look forward to joining them on their journeys, embracing simplicity on the route to success.