Use AI-Led Automation To Get Bigger, Faster, Safer And More Innovative
April 1, 2021 / Unisys Corporation
It’s a competitive, ever-changing, dangerous world out there. You need to move quickly to provide citizens and customers with needed solutions — and those solutions must be secure.
This can be challenging amid growing cyberthreats, heightened customer expectations, the onslaught of data volume, variety and velocity, and requirements created by our new touchless world.
You can’t keep up with all that on your own. With artificial intelligence (AI)-led automation, you don’t have to. While legacy automation tools require manual configuration and human supervision to effectively execute processes, AI leverages computer systems to use huge amounts of data to imitate human intelligence and reasoning. This enables AI-led automation systems to learn, predict and recommend what to do next.
AI-led automation can lower your risk, make you faster and more efficient, and help you be more innovative. Here’s how you can use AI-led automation to realize maximum benefit.
Lower Your Risk
Cloud misconfiguration breaches cost organizations roughly $5 trillion between 2018 and 2019 alone. In this period, misconfigured cloud services contributed to an estimated 200 breaches and exposed more than 30 billion records. And because adoption of the cloud drastically accelerated amid the pandemic as organizations sought solutions to enable business continuity, the possibility for misconfiguration is greater than ever.
But there’s only so much a human can grasp in terms of checking for misconfigurations. There’s also a limit to how much time you want to dedicate to having staff recheck configuration. Plus, Gartner says that through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
Use AI-led automation to handle this for you. It will lower the likelihood of breaches. At the same time, it will free people from this tedious task and enable them to focus on innovating.
Accelerate Your Go-To-Market
Rapid provisioning is more important than ever. Use AI-led automation to ensure your environment is set up rapidly and in a highly secure and compliant way. You will find that what used to take months of manual coordination now takes mere hours to achieve.
Our company recently worked with a state agency that needed to move fast yet lacked internal cloud design and management expertise, had to meet complex compliance requirements, and was grappling with integration challenges. The agency leveraged the power of automation to quickly provision infrastructure and applications and roll out an AI-enabled chatbot. This innovative solution helps citizens file unemployment claims at a time in which U.S. unemployment is still almost twice that of its pre-pandemic level.
Businesses — and those that they serve — also are benefitting from the power of AI-led automation. For example, a drug company that we worked with was able to innovate more quickly with new services and applications as it raced to find drugs and vaccines by the adoption of CI/CD pipeline automation and DevSecOps paradigms.
Embrace Full-Stack Automation
People often think about automation in terms of provisioning. But automation takes many forms. Be aware that you can automate all your day-to-day cloud operations.
Perhaps you need to implement a software patch or create a backup. Use automation for that.
Apply automation to do validation of your software applications as well, including regular scans of your code.
Find Vulnerabilities Earlier
Automation is helpful as you shift left on security so you can address software vulnerabilities as soon as possible. The shift-left principle is a key aspect of DevSecOps.
Organizations have adopted DevSecOps to address the cloud’s variety of computing and services. AI is the only way forward if you want to scale.
Leverage AI-led automation and operations to identify software security gaps as they arise. As recent breaches have illustrated, securing the entire software life cycle is important. AI-led automation paired with a shift-left security strategy will lower your risk from cyberthreats.
Address The Talent Gap
An estimated 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfilled in 2021. And MIT Technology Review says that fewer than a quarter of cybersecurity job candidates are qualified.
Skill shortages for cloud security specialists are among the most acute. ESG analyst Jon Oltsik says, “With organizations developing more software, moving workloads to the public cloud, and facing more sophisticated threats, these shortages are disconcerting, to say the least.”
Supplement your tech talent with AI-led security automation to fill the cybersecurity gap.
Get Personal
If you can’t get new solutions out in a timely fashion, you’re dead in the water. And if your offerings are the same for everyone, customers will not see you as adding a great deal of value.
Customize and personalize your solutions to address your customers’ unique needs. McKinsey says that personalization at scale can reduce retail marketing sales costs by 10%-20% while lifting retail customer loyalty, engagement and wallet share. And it’s not just retailers and their customers that can benefit from customization and personalization — this applies to any sector.
But what if you have thousands of customers? How can you deliver personalized service at scale? You can’t have as many associates as clients. Use automation and AI to provide innovative solutions that are customized and personalized to users based on their business processes, industries, geographies, individual behaviors, pain points or other requirements.
Choose Partners Wisely
Given the importance and challenges of cloud security and innovation today, chances are high that you’re going to need some help on these fronts. That’s OK — no one can do it all alone.
Look for partners with a proven capacity to deliver AI-led automation.
We’re talking technology, but the end game is business outcomes. Only when you select such partners can you become more agile, innovative, scalable and secure. AI-led automation makes that happen so you can realize your customers’ and your own intended business outcomes.
