A Thousand Change Requests (Un)done in Under a Minute, a Challenge by Replayable
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Lets say a medium sized company had a security breach, requiring a password reset (doesn't have to be the password, could be anything technology-related at all.) The company maintains several databases, some on-premises and some in the cloud. Let's say the application owner opens the change request. The ticket is placed in an approver's queue, and then, in a few days, it is emailed to a database administrator. The admin then resets a few passwords on his own schedule. The job is done. Until the next threat, that is, then again, and again. Can such a medium-sized IT shop benefit from task automation? It could, but the ROI would be too low to justify the expense. Granted, the admin will be able to reset the passwords with fewer clicks, but that will not make the company more successful by any stretch of imagination. After all, no new customers are brought on board due to such partial automation. No new products, features, or services rolled out—no competitors left in the rear-view mirror. Granted, the admin will undoubtedly like the automation products because the exposure makes his resume stand out. However, the business wouldn't even notice the result, except for writing the big check for the partial automation license and wasting the employees' valuable time on training that would soon be rendered useless. This is the "lagging counterpart" scenario.
Now, lets talk enterprise. An entirely different picture. Thousands of instances by hundreds of vendors in countless cloud products (Oracle, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) with exactly 2,807,657,387,458,560 password variations. Yes, the enterprise uses an enormous amount of technology, but that is incidental. The enterprise knows where it will be in a few years and how to get there. Unlike everyone else, it uses technology to anticipate and build its future, rather than reacting to marketing hype or the products and features its competitors rolled out last quarter. To the market leader, to the enterprise, being here and now is an inconvenience because it is already thinking ten years in the future. That is the difference. It is not technology. It is the mindset. It takes courage to ask, "How can I propel this business into the stratosphere at any cost at all, with or without me?" It takes a leader to answer it, and it takes a market leader to follow through.
To illustrate the point, we will conduct a simple experiment. We will test how ready a conventionally automated company is for the near future, just a few short years ahead. Then we will see how market leaders ALREADY handle the same situation here and now, live. The database password rotation is just an example. Could be any hardware or software related situation. Here is our demo of the database refresh module, as another example. There are hundreds of modules already developed and thousand more to come.
Enterprise Password Rotation (Example), Final Scorecard
| Conventional Automation | Replayable Hyper-Automation | |
|---|---|---|
| Duration | 28 days | 32.836 sec |
| Cost to Business | Approx $82,400 | $0 |
| Error Rate | 4% | 0.001% |
| Scalability | 2X (short burst) | 1,000X+ (consistent) |
For a more technical description please view our hyperautomated database refresh demo here or read on hyperautomation below.
The numbers above are from a past actual client. What took a team of reasonably skilled database administrators a month - remember, people have to eat, sleep and take breaks - our software accomplishes it in under a minute. That is real speed. But speed alone isn't what makes us stand out. It is the quality of service, the scalability, and the ease of use. Once you have purchased our software, you can start assigning it more and more work, just as you would to an employee, until all or at least most of the deployment, provisioning, or maintenance configuration changes are handled by our hyper-automation modules. You can accomplish all that in the very familiar ServiceNow URL (or any other ticketing system). There is no need to train your employees because for all intents and purposes our software acts as an employee. The difference between us and the competition is that they automate tasks. We take over the entire process instead. The results will be visible in a few months. You will be able to accomplish at least twice as much with significantly fewer personnel and technology. The usual projects that used to run way over budget and months behind schedule will be delivered in weeks or less. That is because our hyperautomation modules never eat, sleep, have personal issues, or ask for a raise. They do not understand the concept of "good enough" and honestly think that 9-5 is just a number. Now, for the quality score. Imagine your administrators were always at their best, day in, day out. Forget that, not just at their best, but at the industry's best, because our premium modules have vendors' best practices already embedded.
... before you say "thank you, I am already sufficiently automated", ask your current vendor a few simple questions. Okay, the product saves the database administrator a few clicks here and there by running a script, sending emails, or performing some other useful task. But can their software UNDO the changes without explicitly coding the rollback ahead of time? Ours can. Can their automation know the password of a particular database (or a random collection of them - all of different makers!) will be ten years from now? Ours does. Will their software show a measurable ROI at the end of the year? Or all that will have changed is that you now have to write two checks instead of one (for the automation vendor and the administrators still on payroll?) Ask your current vendor if their automation is reusable? Vendor-agnostic? Is it idempotent and event-driven? Because ours is. The last question you should ask is this. Can their software give you operational control back?
Don't delay. There are two ways to get this proprietarytechnology (patents applied for) . You can either adopt it on your own (after all, we did, took us years and millions, though) by downloading the Free/Faster version (no free support for the free verson), or you can buy the final full featured product. We can also license it to you or build it for you from scratch, according to your specs and schedule. Either way, we are here to take you stratospheric. Contact us now.
Closed-loop hyperautomation is a strategic, business-driven approach that uses a combination of technologies to identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible, moving beyond single tasks to automate complex, end-to-end business process workflows across an entire organization. This transformative approach aims to achieve maximum efficiency, productivity, and operational agility by orchestrating multiple tools and technologies to create a fully automated, intelligent enterprise, according to Gartner and UiPath.
That begs the question - at what point a regular automation effort ascends to the "hyper" status? There are different schools of thought on that.
A. Quantity, not quality. According to the Harvard Business Review, a standard automation process is elevated to coveted “hyper” status when it drives cost reductions of 20%, and increase in operational effectiveness of up to 50% for the tasks they target. It is the percentage that matters here.
B. Quality, not quantity. The doctrine we believe in is based on the first law of automation. To paraphrase the law, the point of automation isn't to accommodate the administrators in executing their daily routine, but to extricate them from it entirely in an effort to benefit the business itself. From a conventional standpoint, if your database administrators increased their output then the automation effort was a wild success. From our point of view, it is a failure. Even if your admins doubled their output, the ROI for the business owner is still too low to justify the conventional automation cost. That is because admin's best is still a human's best. Granted, the human IT help sufficed on-prem, where hardware is physical. But not in the cloud, where technology is too labor intensive, too complex and especially too fluid for a person to keep up with. We have to step back and let the technology manage itself. Similia similibus curentur (or "treating like with the like").
Here are just a few aspects of the modern IT automation to mention:
1. INFLEXIBILITY OF CURRENT AUTOMATION OFFERINGS
Slow, compartmentalized, single-use automation: It takes months or even years to properly automate a process (new versions come out, new requirements are raised, new API’s tested, etc.) When such a process is successfully automated, the effort and the code are rarely reused by other departments or business units. That means when it is time to automate the following application or business process, the enterprise automation department has to start from scratch. The ROI from the current automation offerings by the Cloud vendors may be described as “too little, too late and for too few”.
2. SKILL GAP
Lack of expertise: Organizations struggle to find qualified cloud automation and DevOps engineers, delaying initiatives and leading to potential security vulnerabilities.
Rapid evolution of technology: Cloud technologies change quickly, making it challenging for professionals to stay updated and adapt to new tools and practices.
3. MULTI-CLOUD AND HYBRID COMPLEXITY
Unified management: Managing and governing infrastructure, data, and applications across various cloud platforms (multi-cloud) and environments (hybrid cloud) remains a significant hurdle.
Integration Challenges: Integrating automation tools across different cloud providers, each with its unique APIs and frameworks, can be complex and time-consuming.
Lack of standardization: Multi-cloud environments often result in disparate configurations, creating inconsistencies and security gaps.
4. SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE CHALLENGES
Attack Surface Expansion: Cloud environments expand the attack surface, requiring more robust security measures and automation for detection and response.
Misconfigurations and human error: Cloud infrastructure misconfigurations are a common cause of data breaches, highlighting the need for automated remediation and proactive monitoring.
Lack of visibility: Limited visibility into cloud infrastructure and application behavior makes it difficult to detect and respond to threats in real time.
Regulatory compliance: Ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) across complex cloud environments presents a significant challenge.
5. COST OPTIMIZATION
Cloud waste: Identifying and eliminating unused or underutilized cloud resources is crucial to control costs and maximize the return on investment.
Dynamic Cloud Pricing: Fluctuations in cloud pricing and service options require continuous monitoring and adjustments to optimize costs effectively.
6. AUTOMATION WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
Current automation software inflexibility: All pre-packaged software or Cloud services need time to become fully integrated into an enterprise’s current platform.
Lack of internal standards: Before a process may be automated, it has to follow certain internal conventions; their absence prolongs the automation project or makes it impossible. It is of paramount importance to develop and adopt standardized processes and best practices for building, deploying, and managing automation workflows.
Complex workflows: Designing and managing complex automation workflows with multiple steps and dependencies can be challenging, especially in multi-cloud environments.
Monitoring and observability: Gaining comprehensive insights into the behavior and performance of automated systems requires robust monitoring and observability tools and strategies.
Without a doubt, in the context of the cloud, automation plays a big role. However, while the services automate a large portion of traditional IT tasks, they don't entirely eliminate the need for technical expertise. Instead, they shift the focus of the administrator’s role from routine low level operational tasks to higher-level architectural decisions, performance optimization, and data governance. That is a business side of the IT industry that may not be appealing to the former on-prem DBA, and even if it is, it takes years to even begin to understand that side of the IT business, and decades to master it. Also, the Cloud DBA is expected to be very diverse in his/her knowledge, sometimes unreasonably so. After all, such complex automated workflows rarely include just one database vendor, technology or service. There are hundreds of them now, all mutate and change every day, and the Cloud professional is actually expected to be an expert in them all, at all times. The second factor that presents a significant challenge for the enterprise automation is its cost. Even if a company hired a small team of top notch DevOps professionals that worked exclusively on automating one business process, such an automation effort would require months or even years to document and code. All other work will have to be put on hold while that happens. A smaller company may not have enough time and resources for such a long running and expensive undertaking. A larger enterprise suffers as well, as almost none of the automation efforts are reusable. That implies an automation effort for one project or department is almost never reused by another. Consequently, the smaller companies can’t even afford to enter the custom enterprise automation market, while the larger enterprises are extremely inefficient at it. What is needed, therefore, are systems and methods of reducing the administrative and cost burden associated with IT tasks automation.
While there are other inventions addressing the deficiencies above, they all are too piece-meal (partial and unsystematic) and designed to aid the administrator, instead of replacing him/her entirely. Such inventions usually do not benefit the enterprise as a business entity. For example, let’s say a database team gets some new software feature that may flash a screen with suggestions prior to an execution, or verifies passwords. Will that small feature speed up major product releases or long running projects? Will it put the company as whole ahead of its competition? The answer is a resounding “no”. It doesn’t matter how many features or shortcuts the conventional automation methods introduce. They all rely on a human being somewhere in the chain of the IT maintenance and human are not a very efficient, scalable or secure resource. The only correct way to automate the IT process delivery is to automate it end to end, from detecting the need for opening a service ticket, to actually opening, assigning, approving, executing and all the way to closing it.
The bottom line is this. The modern cloud technology advances too fast for humans to keep up and even if we did, it immediately mutates into something different. The fact that more than a third of the current cloud database products missing any documentation proves the point. We have to let robots manage robots.
Replayable Process Automation, Workflow
Thank you for your kind attention. Once again, we specialize in Oracle and ServiceNow hyperautomation, but our technology is vendor agnostic, with patents pending. The demo module is is just one out of hundreds already developed and thousands more to come. In the meantime, we are here to provide support and consulting for very reasonable rates. Please use the Buy Now or Contact Us button to submit a request.