Artificial intelligence: Coming soon to an infrastructure near you

With IT infrastructure complexity at an all-time high, most enterprises fear that their IT services can't keep pace with their business requirements. Nearly three-fourths of them cite infrastructure limitations as a key hurdle in their digital transformation, according to the consulting and research firm Everest Group. Acknowledging that efforts to align the services provided by IT with business goals are far from novel, the consulting firm points to the marriage of artificial intelligence, analytics and infrastructure management as a potential solution to this perennial challenge. Everest's analysts term the combination of these three technologies "aware automation," noting that by underpinning automated systems with AI and analytics, IT infrastructures will be able to automatically adapt and reconfigure their services in response to user demands. "The trinity of analytics, automation and AI can make the infrastructure run the way business needs it to, without requiring significant oversight or bandwidth," says Ashwin Venkatesan, the Everest Group's practice director.