According to Gartner, by 2025 half of all cloud data centers will deploy advanced robots with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, resulting in 30% higher operating efficiency, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The gap between growing server and storage volumes at data centers, and the number of capable works to manage them all is expanding,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The risk of doing nothing to address these shortcomings is significant for enterprises.

“Data center operations will only increase in complexity as organizations move more diverse workloads to the cloud, and as the cloud becomes the platform for a combinatorial use of additional technologies such as edge and 5G, to name a few.”

Most of the work that takes place in a data center is tedious, complex and repetitive. Examples include capacity planning, rightsizing virtual machine and container environments, or guaranteeing the efficient use of resources to avoid “cloud waste” for enterprises and their buyers. These are all areas where robots excel. “Data centers are an ideal sector to pair robots and AI to deliver a more secure, accurate and efficient environment that requires much less human intervention,” said Nag. There are four areas in which robots will be the most impactful to automating data centers over the next five years:

1. Server upgrades and maintenance: once servers are phased out, the task of decommissioning and destroying drives can be accomplished faster and more efficiently by industrial robots than humans. This is especially true for companies that conduct mass upgrades frequently, for example any cloud provider.

• Monitoring: robot sensor probes provide much more granular server rack temperature data without the need to install any invasive physical hardware. Robots used for remote monitoring can also be utilized to collect other data, such as sound and images to detect any irregularities.

• Data center security: maintaining a digitally and physically secure data center facility is a top priority for all data center companies. Robots can provide a layer of physical security through a range of different capabilities including human temperature checks via heat sensors or license plate recognition for parking facilities.

• AI/ML in cloud operations: in conjunction with robots, modern AI- and ML-enabled technology enables the monitoring and management of IT processes in the data center. Users of this technology, such as site reliability engineers, can interact and communicate with the given platform through natural language. These platforms are capable of learning from past situations to improve efficiency in future instances.

While robots have already been leveraged across industries such as automotive and manufacturing, opportunities across data centers have been overlooked. IT leaders can steer the intelligent automation of cloud data center operations and processes to create key differentiators for their enterprises, such as increased uptime and meeting SLAs for their cloud offerings, which will become more of a reality using robots.

Source:  Gartner     First published on November 01, 2021

Effects on Costa Rican exports

Digital transformation is the process of conversion of organizations, companies, and governments, driven largely by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) and by the development of information technologies. For Costa Rica, this is a potential field of action where this sector has found opportunities for development and diversification.

With an estimated global market value of $665 billion, the Industry 4.0 is an example of how digital technology is becoming a far-reaching impactful force of socioeconomic change, transforming how the world approaches the productive use of technology in all aspects of business and in life.

The country’s technology players are developing products with high-value applications in Industry 4.0 that are primed for global scalability. Successful examples of this include the use of IoT sensors and drones in the agricultural sector, automation in the life sciences sector, and Big Data in the food industry, which is helping to identify consumption patterns and market trends.

More specifically, 54% of IT companies that develop services in 4.0 offer cloud computing; while 36% of this offer specializes in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. These companies have extensive experience in the export of their technological solutions, with a long history in North America, a key market where the Costa Rican offer has diversified its operations and generated added value with its services.

Costa Rica works to consolidate itself as a regional hub in differentiated technologies. Do you want to know more about the opportunities in Costa Rica? Click here for more information or feel free to contact us at newyork@procomer.com