02
Why Sigma · The adoption bottleneck
One automation expert. An entire enterprise waiting.
The real problem
Infrastructure keeps growing. Teams don’t. Patching, troubleshooting and scaling automation still depend on a few specialists and a lot of manual work.
Consider this real-world healthcare IT example.
01
One expert carries it all
In this healthcare IT team, a single automation specialist builds and maintains every automation across 5,000 systems.
02
The backlog keeps growing
23 people in operations want automation now. Every request lands in the same queue, and the queue only gets longer.
03
The tools are the real bottleneck
Legacy automation tools need scripting skills, take weeks to deliver and are only safe in a specialist’s hands.
04
Teams fall back to manual work
So the work gets done by hand instead: slower, inconsistent and error-prone, across an estate that keeps growing.
05
Sigma removes the bottleneck
With Sigma, operations teams automate safely themselves. The backlog clears, and coverage can grow toward the full 50,000 systems.
Common automation challenges
Where IT operations lose time, and take on risk.
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting latency
Resolving infrastructure issues means slow, manual investigation across many tools and systems.
Resilience
Single points of failure
Critical systems rely on fragile dependencies that cause widespread outages when one part fails.
Security
Risky misconfigurations
Undetected configuration errors introduce security risk and operational instability.
Scaling automation
Incompatible tooling
Most automation tools are built for developers, leaving IT operations without practical day-to-day solutions.
Compliance
Configuration drift
Over time systems diverge from their intended state, creating reliability and compliance problems.
Audit
Opaque change tracking
Limited visibility into changes makes it hard to see what changed, and who changed it, during an incident.
Impact
The cost of ineffective IT automation: We can't patch fast enough.
Happening now · Advisory, 21 October
php2shell
Two critical PHP flaws allow unauthenticated remote code execution on any PHP installation serving web requests. Exploitation was seen before public disclosure.
CISA’s first instruction: inventory every system running any PHP version, then patch immediately, starting with internet-facing systems.
The outage · 19 July 2024
And who can forget the CrowdStrike BSOD outage?
8.5M blue screens
Windows systems crashed because of a faulty security update.
The fix was known within hours, but every system had to be recovered one by one.
The pattern
The patch exists. The hard part is finding every affected server, fixing it without breaking production, and proving it’s done, fast.
Emerging pain point
AI-powered vulnerability scanning is overwhelming IT.
AI now finds vulnerabilities faster than teams can fix them. Remediation has to keep pace with discovery.
Remediate as fast as vulnerabilities are found
Log every change to your ITSM
CISO reporting and SIEM integration
AI vulnerability scan · production estate
SQL injection
User input is used directly in a database query
High
Insecure file upload
File names are not validated before saving
High
Exposed database
Database reachable directly from the app tier
Medium
Scan complete · 3 findings
Waiting on remediation