Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.
Building Hyper-Scalable Solutions for All Business Sizes
As businesses become future-ready, hyper-scalability provides essential agility. Automation puts hyper-scalability within reach for businesses of any size.
4 Min Read
Mivolchan19 via Adobe Stock
As businesses seek to transition from scalability to hyper-scalability, effort and implementation processes are often overlooked key considerations. If scaling remains resource-intensive, hyper-scalability will remain out of reach.
Automation is accessible to businesses of any size and is one of the components that lessen the barriers to hyper-scalability. It empowers businesses to meet significantly increased demands without compromising performance or incurring prohibitive costs in scaling their human, technological, and resources.
How Automation Drives Hyper-Scalability
The empowerment of efficient resource management is one of the key benefits automation brings to hyper-scalable solutions because resource efficiency is at the heart of scalability. As businesses seek to achieve the next level of productivity and profitability, it is paramount that they ensure resources are available as need increases but not wasted as need declines.
Automatic resourcing and scaling allow businesses to accommodate demand by dynamically provisioning and allocating resources, including network bandwidth, storage space, and server capabilities. For example, a gaming platform rolling out an upgrade can dynamically scale server capacity as needs fluctuate, thus ensuring optimal performance and a satisfying customer experience.
Automation can also play a key role in managing the distribution of workloads to support scaling. AI-driven platforms, for instance, can dynamically assess resource needs and assign processes to additional resources to avoid overloads and maximize performance. When systems fail or dip below acceptable performance levels, automated systems can identify those issues in real time and facilitate reallocation or the acquisition of additional resources.
Reducing the need for human involvement in the scaling process dramatically increases the speed at which scaling can occur and increases reliability. Systems that rely on automated and validated processes avoid downtime and performance issues that can flow from human errors.
Each of these factors enhances a business’s agility and flexibility, which are foundational elements of hyper-scalability. With automated workflows, businesses can pivot systems with greater speed and reliability.
How Automation Addresses Security Risks
While hyper-scalability brings businesses of any size the potential for enhanced efficiency, it also introduces security risks. Leveraging automation in the hyper-scaling process can ensure systems stay secure as they scale.
Increased complexity is one of the factors inherent in hyper-scaling that lead to greater security risks. As a system expands, its attack surface increases, and each additional component adds potential vulnerabilities that must be considered and safeguarded.
The risk of misconfigurations also increases as a system scales, with recent studies showing that misconfigurations are a very common attack vector, accounting for 11% of attacks on cloud infrastructures. Only phishing and stolen or compromised credentials are more common.
The key benefit of automation from a security perspective is its potential to reduce the risks introduced by human involvement, with statistics showing that human error plays a role in 74% of cybersecurity breaches. The risk of the most common types of breaches is significantly reduced by deploying automation that reduces the reliance on humans, especially in security-related processes.
Automating routine security and scaling tasks is the first step toward reducing risks, including processes like installing security patches and adjusting scaling limits. Automated processes ensure these tasks are performed with accuracy and timeliness.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is another component of automation that reduces security risks. IaC does away with the need for manual configuration of network components by defining provisioning and deployment processes through coding. From a scaling perspective, IaC decreases the time needed for configuration changes and, consequently, the time needed to adjust resource capabilities.
From a security perspective, IaC takes human involvement -- and the potential for human error -- out of the provisioning equation. IaC manages security and other critical updates automatically, essentially creating a foolproof zero-trust environment.
Automation also has the potential to dramatically reduce the risk of social engineering schemes, which is believed to play a role in as many as 90% of cyber attacks. As automation increases, the need for human involvement decreases, meaning fewer system authorizations are needed. That decreases the risk of social engineering by decreasing the number of potential entry points for the system.
Hyper-scalability has emerged as an effective strategy for businesses seeking to gain a competitive edge, but automation is the component that makes it achievable for businesses of any size. By embracing proven methodologies that empower agility and flexibility while providing security, businesses can leverage hyper-scalability to increase revenue and growth by capturing and capitalizing on new opportunities.
About the Author
You May Also Like
More Insights
