As another autumn fast approaches, any look back at the summer would be incomplete without a review of the latest round of Gartner Hype Cycle reports. The Gartner Hype Cycles are an annual summer ritual, a series of reports published every July (and sometimes August) that track the maturity, adoption and business impact of technology innovations.

In the last half-decade, AIOps and observability have arguably been the hottest two topics in IT operations management. Gartner first mentioned AIOps—Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations—in 2016, defining it as using big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, such as event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination.

As more workloads move to the cloud, more employees work remotely and SaaS application adoption increases, enterprises have had to rethink the way they secure access to the IT services their employees need. The reality for most enterprises today is a multi-vendor, siloed approach that has only compounded their security and IT operations management headaches as they end up using multiple management tools to secure and govern their access to cloud services.