When Automation Meets Reality: What Last Week Taught Us About Digital Resilience

This year’s Gartner IOCS delivered one of those moments that forces you to stop and look at the digital world with a bit more honesty than usual. While Gartner Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategy painted a picture of a future defined by autonomous operations, agentic systems, and self-optimising infrastructure, the Cloudflare outage unfolded in parallel and exposed something we often prefer not to confront. Even in a world chasing full automation, the foundations still matter the most.

This was not a small incident. Banks, airlines, retailers, logistics companies, public-sector services, and global digital platforms all felt the impact.  The shockwave moved across critical internet pathways, demonstrating how a single upstream fault can cascade into global disruption - hitting sectors that rely on real-time connectivity and assume inherent stability in the networks they consume.

That contrast stayed with me throughout the week, because it captured the tension every technology leader feels: the future racing ahead while the present occasionally trips over its own cables.

Does Automation Eliminate Fragility?

Listening to Gartner’s sessions, the direction of travel was unmistakable: we are shifting into full hyper-automation mode. Multi-agent systems, distributed AI, self-healing infrastructure, and policy-driven automation will shape the next decade of operations.

But outages like this one are a blunt reminder that all that clever automation still relies on physical networks that can misbehave at the worst possible moment. AI may increasingly run our processes, but it still depends on fibre in the ground, routing tables that can misbehave, and upstream dependencies that can fail without warning.

Where is AI Moving as Data Becomes More Distributed?

One of Gartner’s strongest messages was that AI workloads are becoming more distributed. Cloud, on-premises, edge environments, and micro-locations inside enterprise networks are all emerging as operational AI endpoints.

This shift increases the need for connectivity that is not only available, but observable, predictable, and architected for real-time performance. Expereo’s Enterprise Horizons research with global technology leaders reinforces this trajectory: nearly all organisations now acknowledge their connectivity is not fully ready for AI and data-intensive workloads. Flexibility, resilience, and performance are the gaps most frequently cited.

Is Connectivity Becoming the Deciding Factor?

Every digital ambition now really starts with a more grounded question: can the network behind it actually cope?

If we want distributed AI models, autonomous agents, and real-time orchestration to function at scale, we cannot rely on networks built for a previous era of traffic, applications, and operational assumptions.

This is why the evolution toward Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is accelerating. A modern NaaS architecture provides the programmability, visibility, and dynamic control that these emerging workloads demand.

As the MEF NaaS Blueprint outlines, end-to-end automation, open APIs, and federated ecosystems are no longer optional. They are prerequisites for enabling truly on-demand, multi-cloud, AI-optimised networks.

Does Governance and Visibility Matter More than Hype?

In every session at Gartner IOCS, the theme repeated itself: the organisations succeeding with automation are those that invest heavily in governance, observability, and continuous validation.

Automation amplifies what already exists. If the underlying environment is inconsistent or opaque, automation magnifies instability rather than reducing it.

Real resilience comes from understanding your environment with clarity and being able to act before small problems snowball into big ones.

Expereo’s focus on data-driven performance management, full lifecycle visibility, and automated supplier orchestration is rooted in exactly this requirement. Outages are unavoidable, blindness is not.

Is Human Expertise Still the Ultimate Failsafe?

Despite the industry’s enthusiasm for agentic automation, this week showed that skilled people remain central to digital resilience. When the internet shakes, it’s still humans who steady it. Tools accelerate us, but they do not replace accountability or experience when things go wrong.

At Expereo, our teams worked through the incident to mitigate downstream impacts for customers and restore stability as quickly as possible. The incident validated something we have long believed: automation is essential, but expert oversight is irreplaceable.

The Does the Road Ahead Look Like?

The future will unquestionably be more autonomous, distributed, and intelligent. But these capabilities only thrive on strong, stable, and predictable foundations.

Connectivity is one of those foundations. As organisations push further into AI-driven operations and more workloads migrate to the edge, the network fabric becomes the strategic enabler for transformation. Outages like this are not setbacks, they are reminders of the work still ahead of us as an industry.

If there is one takeaway from last week, it’s that every bold vision still depends on today’s infrastructure being resilient enough to carry the weight of what’s coming. Strengthening that foundation is no longer optional.