Automation and Security Are the Trends to Watch

Technology moves incredibly fast and there’s always something new on the horizon that has the potential to change your business. Last quarter (Q3 2020), we launched The Rackspace Technology™ Trends Viewpoint, a quarterly e-book series where our top technologists share their collective thoughts on what’s trending in tech. The goal is to help you figure out which trends in tech are worth exploring, and which aren’t worth your time.

As a tumultuous 2020 draws to a close and plans are underway for 2021, we’ve written a new set of predictions. This e-book advises on how leaders should approach topics like automation, workforce planning and security as we look at the coming year.

CTOs Tolga Tarhan and Jeff DeVerter host the latest episode of Cloud Talk to discuss the most important tech trends for Q4 2020, unwrapping the contents of the most recent Rackspace Technology Trends Viewpoint e-book.

Tune in to hear about the following:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) and modernizing business processes
• The evolution of automation and what’s next in the automation space
• AIOps and what this means for level 1 engineers
• Automation and workforce planning
• Network security and the death of the perimeter

On the topic of RPA, Tarhan explains that automation is driving engineers further up the stack where the work is more engaging. “Some people fear that as you replace humans with automation, that there’s going to be nothing left for humans to do. But I think history has shown us that as you free up humans to do higher up the stack work, it simply just advances things more quickly, and that, in fact, frees up a lot of intellectual capital for other work. It allows those folks to do things that are more engaging.”

Tarhan continues on the topic of automation by recognizing the remarkable progress in terms of the time it takes for automation to occur. “The time frame from when something is invented to when it’s automated is shrinking. It took us forty years to get from people doing level-1 engineering support to automating it. It’s taken us three years to get from people building handwritten or hand trained ML models, to having it happen automatically.”

On the topic of security, Tarhan says a human element will add more value. “What’s missing right now is a way to take the information from all these new security services, and actually provide a human-driven operations center that can look at those. So funnily enough, this is opposite of RPA and AIOps where we said it’s all AI. Here, AI is already built in effectively to the security solutions. And what you’re surfacing to the humans is the stuff that AI is saying is suspicious. And being able to pull all that into one place and have analysts look at it is lacking in the marketplace today.”