Tanium today previewed an autonomous endpoint management (AEM) platform that provides IT teams with a graphical tool through which they can orchestrate a series of actions that will automatically execute.
Rather than requiring IT teams to master a programming language, the Tanium AEM platform will automatically execute a playbook that an IT team can declaratively define.
Tanium CTO Matt Quinn said the overall goal is to make it simpler for IT teams to create custom playbooks that, for example, can be automatically applied across a highly distributed computing environment, he added.
The Tanium AEM platform is based on Tanium Guardian, a framework the company developed for identifying and prioritizing remediation efforts based on the level of risk a vulnerability represents to the business using data collected in real time from endpoints.
It’s not clear how IT automation will evolve as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve. Many manual workflows might, for example, be soon automated using a set of prompts through which a generative AI platform is instructed to create the code required. In other instances, the level of scale at which endpoints need to be managed will require a dedicated automation framework. Tanium is already participating in a Microsoft Copilot for Security initiative that integrates its automation framework with an instance of a generative AI platform.
Regardless of approach, rather than having to manually update endpoints, IT teams will increasingly supervise automation frameworks augmented with AI capabilities to manage IT environments that are become more distributed with each passing day.
The challenge is making all those capabilities accessible to IT teams that have historically managed processes sequentially that in many cases can now be executed in parallel at much higher levels of scale, noted Quinn.
There may still be exceptions that require human intervention, but many of the tasks being performed today can be incorporated into a playbook that automatically executes. Exactly how the role of IT teams will evolve in this new age remains to be seen, but many of the tasks currently assigned to entry level members of an IT staff are going to be increasingly automated. IT teams will still be needed to verify the automation frameworks in place are correctly executing tasks, but in effect they will be supervising processes rather than manually performing them.
That should ultimately reduce the level of toil that IT teams experience managing increasingly complex IT environments. In theory, that should result in organizations being able to build, deploy and manage more applications than ever without having to hire a small army of additional IT professionals.
One way or another, the future of IT service management (ITSM) has arrived. The issue now is determining how best to reorganize teams as more tasks are automated. The goal isn’t necessarily to replace IT professionals as much as it should be to enable them to better understand the requirements of their organization in a way that realizes the promise of investing in IT to boost productivity better.
