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EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

For instance , patching continues to be a thorn in the side of many organisations : patching is risky as it means things can break , while not patching means being exposed to security breaches .

Then there ’ s the decision of which patches to deploy and the risk of an installation failure . Luckily , automation can take the pressure off IT teams by investigating which patches are most appropriate for each system , cross-referencing previous successful patches , managing the full process – including post-patch verification and testing . This helps reduce the chance of human error and ensures effective patch deployment .

A tricky aspect of patching is that it ’ s incredibly time-consuming – its never-ending cycles require end-to-end orchestration and thorough system monitoring . It can take months to install a required patch throughout an environment , with staff trying to patch thousands of vulnerable servers , having to perform specific steps manually each time . Automation can come in handy here as it enables simultaneous patches to be applied across multiple vulnerabilities , dramatically accelerating operations and eliminating the risk of failure .

Patching also requires post-patch tests and verifications . Once a patch has been deployed , installation failures can occur , leading to services being interrupted or entirely new problems arising .

With automation , IT teams can swiftly perform health checks , identify and log issues and quickly resolve problems pre- and postpatching – no more post-patching anxiety .

Another way automation – alongside AI – can enhance security is AIOps . It harnesses AI , Machine Learning and advanced analytics to aggregate and analyse immense volumes of data collected from a wide variety of sources across the IT infrastructure . In doing so , AIOps quickly identifies existing or potential issues , spots

( the needle in the proverbial haystack of data ) and pinpoints the root cause of problems . Through Machine Learning and advanced pattern matching , these solutions can even effectively predict future issues , enabling IT teams to automate proactive fixes before issues ever impact the business .

AIOps technologies also offer advanced correlation capabilities to determine how alarms relate to one another . This separates the signal from the noise and ensures IT teams focus their attention in the right place , streamlining operations . Additionally , many AIOps solutions can automatically map the dependencies between dynamic , changing infrastructure components to provide real-time visualisation of the relationships between applications and underlying technology . This makes it much easier to see how things are connected when troubleshooting and significantly reduces the time to solve problems . • www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO

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