By Tim Armandpour, Senior Vice President Of Engineering, PagerDuty

By 2025, "real time" won't be good enough

With the race to "real-time" in digital operations management continuing to pick up steam, it won't be long until "live" data stops being fast enough, and the data that predicts the future becomes a key differentiator for every department in innovative companies. With this, we can also expect unplanned work reduction, changes in the process of building out cloud security, and AI/ML advances that support human creativity by cutting down on inefficiencies.

These are the major trends we can expect to see in 2020 and beyond: 

• By 2025, "real time" won't be good enough. The industry will need to move beyond real time to become predictive.
• Soon, real-time technology won't feel fast enough. We will need to go one step further to actually predict what's coming before it happens. This will require looking for signals and patterns -- not unlike the work of a meteorologist. There are patterns from past weather events that can tell scientists, for example, that there's an 80% chance of a category three hurricane becoming a category five when it hits land. Large sets of accurate data can provide context and highlight emerging patterns, revealing degrees of probability. With a little help from AI, prediction is within reach.
• In digital operations, preventing incidents before they happen is not that far off. But the first step is understanding the context of past scenarios -- what transpired, what worked, and what didn't work -- and bringing it all together to help teams determine the next course of action. 
  

• In their next phase, AI and ML will become our allies (not our replacements) 
• For AI and ML to be successful, the next few years will be about finding the sweet spot where you put human power and human thinking first, then add just the right amount of AI and ML to make things more efficient. 
• DevOps has such a strong human component. It is at its core a creative process. Rather than automating operations out of the way, AI and ML can be an ally; something teams can lean on to help cut down on inefficiencies. 
• We can expect to see a human workforce empowered by AI and ML. But DevOps is, and will continue to be, all about people.
• In digital operations, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) combines big data with ML to improve human performance for all teams, be they DevOps, ITOps, SecOps, Network Ops, customer support, etc.
  

• Forget reliability - with the adoption of resilience engineering and the proper use of automation, operators can expect a 20% reduction in unplanned work. 
• Today's organizations are fixated on the reliability of their technology. But any developer can tell you that the reality is not if it will fail, but when it will fail. The success metric will shift to resilience, or how quickly you can recover from failure. The industry at large is still focused on ensuring tech won't fail, but resilience engineering will break onto the scene in a major way in 2020. As Forrester advises, "Design for dependability, not just availability." 
• To achieve the customization and flexibility that are key to fast-paced, resilient digital operations, we'll start to see organizations, especially larger ones, use tools with automation, but combine them with resilience techniques based in collaborative resolution. 
  

• Security will continue to "Shift Left" (with a little help from the cloud) 
• We've seen significant momentum in organizations of all sizes around the notion of security shifting left--aka getting more embedded in the earlier parts of the operations cycle.
• The rise of cloud infrastructure will be a positive force in driving this change, as the rapid adoption of cloud creates dependencies that are not under the internal team's direct control. 
• Figuring out ways to safeguard a cloud system will be critical, driving the need for teams to ensure that they're well equipped to have a credible and solid security posture in place from day one.
• DevOps will help usher this along -- ensuring the value of security is front and center. As security is tackled early in the development process, companies will no longer be able to sidestep or delay security processes and procedures, let alone question if they're affordable.
  

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About the Author

Tim Armandpour, Senior Vice President Of Engineering