The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and what it means for the management of enterprise public cloud. (Part 1)
01/12/2023 Version 1.00
The Introduction
Today the aviation industry sets a remarkable precedent with up to 20,000 aircraft seamlessly traversing our skies at any given moment, supported by a blend of advanced technology and skilled human oversight. This synergy between humans and technology ensures safe take-offs, global navigation, and landings. The synergy between the aircraft captain, copilot and the on-board computer technology forms a three-way symbiotic relationship that enables missions of small operation during a flight to be accomplished smoothly. Imagine applying a similar paradigm to the realm of enterprise public cloud applications and infrastructure management. Where artificial intelligence augments the cloud teams to respond to every aspect of both cloud applications and infrastructure. Consider the transformative potential of integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our cloud teams, going beyond the current applications of machine learning in cloud observability areas like monitoring. Envision AI not just as a tool but as an active participant in the cloud management team, contributing to and enhancing cloud-related tasks.
This innovative approach births the concept of AI Cloud and IT Management (AI-CIM). In AI-CIM, artificial intelligence doesn't merely support but actively augments existing cloud teams and processes. This integration enables work to be conducted more efficiently, with enhanced security, while adhering to governance best practices and standards at scale. AI-CIM thus represents a paradigm shift, where AI's role transcends from a mere facilitator to a core component of the cloud infrastructure team. This integration promises to revolutionize how we deploy, manage, secure, and operate our enterprise public cloud infrastructure.
By adopting AI in cloud management, we can anticipate a future where routine and complex cloud tasks are executed with greater precision and speed, freeing human team members to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of cloud infrastructure and the delivery of client value and innovation. The AI's continuous learning capability ensures that it adapts and evolves with the ever-changing cloud environment, ensuring up-to-date security measures and compliance with evolving standards, something that present a challenge for humans unless they are in a continuing learning cycle. Adding to the challenges for humans in cloud management is the deep skills required to manage multi-cloud. AI-CIM.
Furthermore, this approach heralds a new era of cloud governance. AI-CIM can proactively identify and mitigate risks, enforce policies, and ensure compliance with industry regulations, all while optimizing resource utilization and cost efficiency. The result is a more resilient, secure, and efficient cloud infrastructure, managed by a synergistic team of technology-augmented humans and intelligent systems.
AI-CIM is not just an enhancement but a transformative step forward in cloud management. It leverages the power of AI to create a more dynamic, secure, and efficient cloud environment, mirroring the remarkable efficiency seen in modern aviation, thus setting a new standard in the field of cloud infrastructure management.
The Vision
Just as we draw parallels from the intricacies of an aircraft's journey - its takeoff, flight, and landing - there are valuable insights to be gleaned for enterprise cloud management. Just as the aircraft computer is not responsible for every aspect of a flight, AI should also not be responsible for every aspect of enterprise cloud management. There is a sweet spot in augmenting the clod management team members and strategically amalgamating their insights and experiences with AI's capabilities. By embracing AI-enabled Cloud Management (AI-CIM), we enable cloud management teams to shift their focus to tasks of lower frequency but higher strategic value, delegating routine, high-volume tasks to AI-CIM. This approach doesn’t strip control from the cloud team; instead, it empowers them to make crucial decisions and prioritize tasks they deem significant. This scenario is reminiscent of modern aviation, where pilots remain indispensable in decision-making and operations, despite the assistance of advanced automated systems. In a similar vein, AI-CIM acts as a force multiplier for cloud management teams, scaling operations in line with business demands, enhancing security, fostering innovation, and reducing the cost per management task.
Our initial analogy regarding aircraft taking off, flying, and landing safely has much we can learn from. The aircraft computer is only one part of a system of people and processes that work together to get people from one’s destination, onto the aircraft, bags stored, aircraft prepped and ready for takeoff, and so on. And the vision here is not to attempt to replace every aspect of enterprise cloud management with AI, as that would take years because of many factors, but trust and safety would be one, the other factor is there are still aspects of the process that humans will do better than even AI.
So is there a middle ground between having AI take over the total management of enterprise public cloud management and having humans managing public cloud through the creation of automation couples with manual processes. The middle ground is not AI, humans out of the management of public cloud, but to leverage their strengths, their knowledge and experience. Leveraging the cloud management team members’ knowledge and experience with the adoption of AI-CIM means the team members can focus their efforts on lower volume high value tasks and offload the high-volume low value tasks to AI-CIM. With all the advantages of keeping full control over what final decisions and even key decisions that the cloud team member feels are important. Much like the pilots of today’s airlines, the cloud management team members are still a key part of the day-to-day decisions and action be taken, with the help of AI-CIM performing many functions that are low value, high value and bring little of no value. With AI-CM augmenting of the cloud management team members, the overall management task rate scale with the business needs, improves security, enables innovation, and reduces the overall management cost per management task.
The Opportunity
The integration of Artificial Intelligence for Cloud Management (AI-CIM) in the administration of enterprise public cloud infrastructure is a transformative development, offering immense potential to revolutionize how we approach, designing & architecting, building, operating, and improving every facet of our enterprise public cloud.
Cost-Effective Management: AI-CIM enables more efficient management of cloud resources, reducing the financial overhead. For instance, AI can predict and allocate resources more effectively, preventing over or underutilization and thus cutting costs. And provide both AI automated remediation and human guided automated remediation of resources, infrastructure, and applications. Provide human natural language interface for cloud cost management to enable people of all levels to interact with cost information related to the enterprise public cloud infrastructure, services, and applications.
Enhanced Delivery Speed and Reliability: AI-CIM accelerates the provisioning and deployment of cloud resources and services. It can autonomously monitor performance and preemptively address issues, ensuring high reliability. For example, AI could automatically scale services during peak usage times to maintain performance without human intervention.
Scalability with Minimal Human Intervention: AI-CIM facilitates the scaling of infrastructure and applications with minimal human input. It can analyze trends and make informed decisions about when and how to scale, exemplified by automated scaling in response to real-time user demand.
Advanced Security and Remediation: AI-CIM provides sophisticated security measures, with the capability to act and remediate issues across cloud infrastructure and applications. It can detect and neutralize security threats in real-time, such as identifying unusual network traffic that could indicate a cybersecurity threat.
Cost and Governance Oversight: AI-CM can identify cost-related issues and governance or policy breaches, offering solutions to rectify them. For example, it could detect unused or underused resources, recommending decommissioning or re-allocation to optimize spending.
Increased Visibility: AI-CM offers a higher level of visibility into the enterprise public cloud infrastructure, making it easier to monitor and manage. This could involve real-time dashboards that provide insights into resource utilization, performance metrics, and operational health.
Efficient Resource Allocation: Teams using AI-CIM can concentrate their efforts where they are most needed, avoiding time-consuming tasks. This means human resources can focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance.
Change Management: AI in cloud management revolutionizes 'Change Management' by automating tasks, predicting issues, and optimizing timings. This reduces risks and disruptions, ensuring efficient, secure, and consistent implementations. The result is a more agile and aligned approach to enterprise cloud management.
Incident Management: AI-CIM transforms enterprise public cloud incident management by automating detection and response, reducing human error and response times. It leverages machine learning to predict and prevent incidents, enhancing efficiency and decision-making. This integration marks a shift towards more resilient, secure, and agile cloud environments.
Security Management: AI-CIM revolutionizes enterprise public cloud security by enabling proactive threat detection and rapid response. It automates routine security tasks and enhances risk assessment with predictive insights. This AI-driven approach ensures dynamic, efficient, and forward-looking security management in an ever-evolving cyber threat landscape.
Conclusions
The opportunities for enterprise cloud management with AI are real and huge, and In upcoming blog posts, I will explore the vast potential of managing enterprise-level public cloud AI-CIM. These discussions will guide today's enterprises in integrating AI-CIM, highlighting ways to replace current manual and labor-intensive activities with more efficient, automated solutions.