A recent Hype Cycle for IT Management Intelligence publication by Gartner stood out for the vision of the future of Endpoint Management. With the increasing adoption of AI, there is an increased focus by vendors to use the data gathered from endpoint to focus on not just automating but also delivering safe autonomous outcomes for Endpoint Management.
Think of this as an autonomous car – a Tesla if you may with FSD – but that is the destination. There will be many Autonomous systems along the way that will lead to this destination e.g. Cruise Control, Lane Assist, etc. And those of us who have used all of these systems in the past will feel the most comfortable in letting the car drive us.
This will be no different for Autonomous Endpoint Management. I dont expect customer who have little or no automation turning on an autonomous system on day 1. Specially not after the trust that has eroded due to the recent global outages – customers will look at all automations and updates with stained glasses. Unfortunately!!!
To get to this Autonomous destination there will be 3 Key capabilities existing Endpoint Vendors will need to have
- Access to real time data – back to the car analogy – imagine FSD making decisions based on historical training sets alone but not on the the dynamic environment thats changing every second around the car. Endpoint environments are constantly changing and success of any autonomous strategy will depend on the ability of the solution to know whats happening in real time e.g. did a patch have a bad outcome or did it fail often
- A Rating System – just like with FSD, every millisecond decision is driven by a confidence score. Its not a binary system of Yes and No’s. This will be no different for Endpoint management. Every change will need to be monitored and rated and its impact used to determine the degree of confidence with which this or a similar change will impact and environment.
- A Ring Rollout – Imagine if FSD went out to all customers at once. That would be a catastrophe waiting to happen. On the other hand controlled ring rollouts will have a chance to automate iterate and remediate.
Here is a great interview demystifying and simplying what Autonomous Endpoint Management is and why its time is now.
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