By Bernd Greifeneder, CTO and Co-Founder, Dynatrace

The 3 Trends That Will Define How Enterprises Conquer IT Complexity in 2020

AI and cloud environment adoption has changed the game for IT over the past decade. These technologies have opened the door for businesses to create compelling digital experiences. But they have also come with a cost, introducing new levels of complexity into enterprise technology stacks.

Now it's more difficult than ever to understand your IT environment, let alone identify and resolve any problems that may be occurring in that environment. That's why, as 2020 and a new decade get under way, I'm predicting that these three trends will define how enterprises finally rein in IT complexity.  

1. CIOs will lean on ‘explainable AI' to bridge the gap between enterprise cloud needs and digital transformation pressures.

Research shows that IT organizations are struggling to keep pace with the demands of digital transformation. The scale of modern enterprise cloud environments has grown so complex that it's now moved past the point where human beings can manage it alone.

AI and automation balance the need to embrace an enterprise cloud environment with the complex requirements of digital transformation. So, it's no surprise that we'll see CIOs increasingly incorporate automation into their technology stacks in 2020. But, taking it even a step further, this need for automation will also prompt CIOs to demand greater levels of accuracy and transparency than they currently get from the more statistical predictions provided by machine learning-based AI.

That's why I see explainable AI really starting to take off this year. An artificial intelligence system must be able to identify performance anomalies and system problems with precise, explainable insights into their root causes. It also must automatically trigger self-healing actions that resolve those issues before they affect end users. Explainable AI ticks off both of these boxes, making it an increasingly necessary solution for IT's toolbox going forward.

2. IT organizations will kickstart autonomous cloud transformations.

Ninety percent of CIOs already believe that AI is critical to their ability to master IT complexity and the accelerating pace of digital transformation. But this has to go beyond just relying on explainable AI, and as such, I'm expecting that enterprises will begin undertaking full autonomous cloud transformations.

That starts with CI/CD pipelines and autonomous, self-healing production operations. In bringing together AI and advanced automation for both DevOps processes and cloud-native environments, enterprises are better positioned to create continuous software delivery pipelines that reduce the need for constant manual intervention from IT. More than that, an automated approach empowers these dynamic environments to resolve their own performance problems before they can negatively impact the end user, all without needing to involve someone from IT first.

This change will spark the beginning of a new era of autonomous cloud management in cloud-native environments, completely redefining how both the developer and operations sides of a traditional IT organization think, function and align with each other. And that in turn will also create new responsibilities and opportunities for both groups.

3. NoSOC will redefine how IT thinks about security.

Finally, I think the next big shift to follow explainable AI and autonomous cloud transformations will happen in the security operations center (SOC). SOC teams today are simply subjected to too many false positives to monitor and react to on a regular basis. This distracts them from their actual job of securing enterprise services and applications and safeguarding data privacy for the business and its customers.

The problem is made worse by the dynamic nature of modern cloud environments and microservices. To get all of this under control, IT organizations will need to move in a ‘NoSOC' direction, automating the more tedious elements of security management in order to achieve quicker and more precise insights, threat detection, analysis and remediation. The less time SOC teams have to spend chasing down false positives, the more they can put their time and energy into more meaningful security and data privacy initiatives that actually require their unique input and expertise - leaving the rest of the legwork to the AI.

A year - and decade - for AI and the autonomous cloud

The 2010s were a decade defined by AI and the cloud. But it also ushered in a new world of IT complexity that enterprises are still struggling with.

In 2020, many of the major change agents for IT organizations will have to revolve around streamlining the complexities of enterprise cloud digital transformations, and making their technology stacks easier to understand, monitor and manage. To that end, explainable AI, autonomous cloud management and NoSOC processes should all be top of mind for CIOs looking to finally get on top of their IT complexity problem and keep up with both the competition and customer demands in the ‘20s.

##

About the Author

Always driven by what's just over the horizon, Bernd is taking Dynatrace solutions into a brilliant future. He's a serial entrepreneur, Dynatrace being his third successful venture. With more than 15 years of engineering leadership under his belt, Bernd owns nine tech patents-including Dynatrace PurePath® technology and the new Dynatrace platform, our new generation Software Intelligence solution. He believes in paying his experience forward so, in his spare time, he advises startup companies, speaks at entrepreneurial events and supports academic technology research. An adventurous spirit, Bernd prefers alpine or oceanic adventures to relaxing on a beach. He applies the same drive and determination to keeping Dynatrace on the leading edge of DPM.