Autonomous cloud, putting progressive businesses in the driving seat

By Cherian Varghese

It is clear that businesses across Asia Pacific are becoming increasingly optimistic about the opportunities today’s digital economy presents. In fact, Gartner’s annual survey of CIOs1 , shows IT leaders in APAC are adopting new, disruptive technologies at a higher rate than their global peers.

As part of this, enterprises are starting to embrace areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), recognising their power to help them innovate faster, drive change and operate more efficiently and securely. However, the incredible pace of technological change can make it feel impossible to keep up, and with the newness of it all and so many companies looking to harness the benefits, skills to support these areas are in short supply. 

To help with this, forward looking leaders should look to capitalise on the advantages brought by the next generation of computing: ‘autonomous cloud’. 

What is an 

autonomous cloud?

Autonomous cloud represents a new category of cloud services. This new style cloud platform powered by AI and ML has the potential to help businesses across the globe reduce risk, lower costs, do more with less and get more value from their most important business asset, their data.

In the longer run, the resulting ‘autonomous organisation’ will reach an ideal state where it does not need the touch of humans to run its day-to-day operations and maintain its core IT systems. Instead, AI and automation, working together in harmony, will manage everything from database to application development, to providing predictive insight around business processes, all without human input. This will free up resources from the burden of managing complex IT systems, which can be focused on tasks that provide higher value to the business: innovation, through the creation of new applications and better ways to serve customers, employees and partners. 

An autonomous cloud is underpinned by three basic concepts – that it is self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing. Through self-driving, the service automatically backs itself up, fixes issues on its own, recovers quickly, and automatically tunes itself, all while the service is up and running. This improves efficiency, reduces cost and eliminates human labour and human error. 

Being self-securing, the system automatically applies patches with no downtime helping protect itself from malicious external attacks. According to Forbes, 85% of breaches exploited system vulnerabilities where a patch had been available for 12 months2.  

Finally, imagine your organisation’s main server fails. Most often, under these circumstances the chances of recovering your data are minimal. For organisations that have implemented autonomous cloud services, thanks to its third aspect – self-repairing, they are provided with automated protection from all planned and unplanned downtime, so even if a server goes 

 1. https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3822766 

 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/05/10/oracle-ceo-mark-hurd-how-to-instantly-prevent-95-of-database-cyberattacks/ 

down because of some disaster, the service will backup and recover without any disruption to the end user.3

Delivering new capabilities through autonomous 

For many companies, these new autonomous capabilities can’t come soon enough. 

Internally, most organisations are facing huge challenges with managing legacy, complex IT platforms where 80% of their resources are spent running ‘business4  as usual’ activities. 

They are being tested by the current explosion of data and rising cyber attacks and data breaches –both of which are spiralling out of control and becoming harder to manage. Additionally, many face new competition from new startups that now have the ability to continuously innovate and scale their businesses into exciting ventures thanks to the global cloud capabilities on offer from traditional cloud services. 

This means there’s barely any time left to innovate and modernise. 

Fortunately, with the rise of new innovative technologies, like autonomous cloud, there has never been more opportunity for progressive business leaders to take control. By standing on the shoulders of others and leveraging autonomous cloud services, IT organisations and hence businesses can deliver new capabilities and more business value much faster than they would have ever dreamed possible before.  

The benefits aren’t only for large organisations – autonomous services also offer a blessing for small businesses. Being big and fast does not mean much in this digital age; it is all about being smart, agile and able to move in the right direction. This is precisely what autonomous cloud does to enable modern day organisations. With autonomous, businesses without their own database administrators or hardware will suddenly gain access to new technologies like data warehousing solutions for the very first time enabling them to better compete.

A new category with immense potential

For those that reach out and grasp the opportunity, there is huge potential. By the end of 2018, Gartner forecasts that global business value derived from artificial intelligence will total $1.2 trillion, an increase of 70% from 2017 – a figure that is anticipated to grow to $3.9 trillion in 2022. In the area of decision automation there is also significant acceleration expected – currently it accounts for just 2% of the global AI-derived business value in 2018, but it will grow to 16% by 2022.5

3http://ft.lk/front-page/Everything-you-need-to-know-about-autonomous-cloud--the-latest-category-of-IT/44-657735 

4http://ft.lk/front-page/Everything-you-need-to-know-about-autonomous-cloud--the-latest-category-of-IT/44-657735

 5  https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3872933

That is why we expect that more than 50% of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously in the cloud by 2020 and 90% of all enterprise applications to include a customer AI-based capability.6

This is a totally new category of IT, and we are just at the start of the journey but it won’t be long before autonomous cloud services bring simplicity, self-service with integrated security into all areas of the business, providing new fuel for innovation. Are you ready to capitalise on the advantages brought by the next generation of computing: ‘autonomous cloud’?

(The writer is Regional MD – ASEAN and SAGE Cluster.)

 6http://ft.lk/front-page/Everything-you-need-to-know-about-autonomous-cloud--the-latest-category-of-IT/44-657735