When things get too complex and move too fast for humans to handle, systems designers are left with two options. The first is to slow things down, throwing a lot of process-oriented sand into the system so that people can watch things happen around the slow-grinding cogs and throw switches and levers to implement safety decisions. This is common and almost always a bad solution.
The other option is to make the system itself so smart that it can make most decisions on its own without slowing things down at all. Of course, to do this right, you need to gather as much information as possible to feed into the decision-making process. Both pieces of this are behind two acquisitions announced by Microsoft to boost machine-to-machine AI operations.
First came the announcement of Microsoft's purchase. Claudinea small startup that has software that monitors and manages cloud storage across a wide range of public and private cloud architectures. Now, a month later, Microsoft has attacked Hexagonala company specializing in security automation, according to a report in Calculator.
Since we're talking about Microsoft, any of these acquisitions (or, since they haven't been finalized, possible Acquisitions can be seen as a vacuum. In the past 18 months, Microsoft has also acquired Metanautix (in big data analytics) and Maluuba (an AI company). Now, Microsoft has also bought several other companies at the same time, but it doesn’t take the best business analyst in the world to see that Microsoft wants to make the Azure cloud faster, easier to manage, and more secure.
At the 2017 Gartner Symposium, a speaker noted a major shift in the relationship between human operators and machine intelligence for critical systems. Two years ago, human analysts made critical decisions for systems, even as machine intelligence set the boundaries of permissible behavior and acted as a circuit breaker if something went wrong. Now, we trust machine intelligence to make the vast majority of decisions, with humans supporting machines in cases where conditions go significantly out of specification.
At this point, no one knows whether the Cloudyn and Hexadite acquisitions (assuming they are completed) will result in the two companies surviving as separate entities living in Microsoft’s robust ecosystem, or whether both companies will be absorbed by the Redmond conglomerate. Either way, Microsoft is clearly keen to be at the center of the cloud computing world, even if the majority of that world is something other than Azure. Bringing companies like these into Microsoft’s fold would allow it to provide rapid response services to customers across the security and incident management spectrum.
Stay tuned for more details on Microsoft’s acquisition strategy. If the recent pace of acquisitions is any indication, more acquisitions are expected in the third quarter—and if economic conditions take a turn for the worse, Microsoft and other deep-pocketed companies are likely to take advantage of this situation to bolster their intellectual property portfolios at bargain prices.
— Curtis Franklin is the editor. Security NowFollow him on Twitter. @kg4gwa.
