IN the past five decades since its establishment, Asean has witnessed a great deal of technological innovations. From the arrival of mainframe computing to the era of cloud computing, which we are in today, each technological milestone has transformed the way people live and work, and how governments and businesses operate.
As Asean looks towards becoming a resilient and innovative bloc, governments and businesses in this region need to be empowered to overcome the disruptions brought upon by the exponential change in technology.
Today, we are seeing enterprises starting to embrace 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 pace of technological change can make it seem impossible to keep up, and with the newness of it all and so many companies looking to harness its benefits, skills to support these areas are in short supply.
To help with this, leaders should capitalise on the advantages brought by the next generation of computing — autonomous cloud.
What is autonomous cloud? It represents a new category of cloud services.
This new style cloud platform powered by AI and ML can help businesses reduce risk, lower costs, do more with less and get more value from their most important business asset: their data.
In the long run, the resulting autonomous organisation will reach an ideal state where it does not need the touch of humans to run its operations and maintain its core IT systems.
Instead, AI and automation, working together in harmony, will manage everything from data-base to application development, to providing predictive insight into 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 business: innovation, through the creation of new applications, and better ways to serve customers, employees and partners.
An autonomous cloud is underpinned by three 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 to protect itself from malicious external attacks.
According to Forbes, 85 per cent of breaches exploited were system vulnerabilities where a patch had been available for 12 months.
Finally, imagine that your organisation’s main server fails. Most often, 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 planned and unplanned downtime.
So even if a server goes down because of disasters, the service will back up and recover without disruptions to end users.
For many organisations, these new autonomous capabilities can’t come soon enough.
Internally, most organisations are facing huge challenges with managing legacy, complex IT platforms where 80 per cent of their resources are spent running “business as usual” activities.
They are being tested by the 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 competition from startups that 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 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 businesses can deliver new capabilities and more business value much faster than they would have ever dreamt possible before.
The benefits aren’t only for large enterprises. 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 what autonomous cloud does to enable organisations.
With autonomous cloud, businesses without their own data-base administrators or hardware will gain access to new technologies like data warehousing solutions for the first time, enabling them to better compete.
For those that reach out and grasp the opportunity, there is huge potential.
By the end of the year, Gartner forecasts that global business value derived from artificial intelligence will total US$1.2 trillion (RM49 trillion), an increase of 70 per cent from last year.
This figure is anticipated
to grow to US$3.9 trillion in 2022.
In the area of decision automation, there is also significant acceleration expected, which accounts for just two per cent of the global AI-derived business value this year, but will grow to 16 per cent by 2022.
That is why we expect that more than 50 per cent of enterprise data will be managed autonomously in the cloud by 2020 and 90 per cent of all enterprise applications to include a customer AI-based capability.
This is a completely 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 fuel for innovation.
Are you ready to capitalise on autonomous cloud?
CHERIAN VARGHESE
Regional managing director of Asean, Oracle