In the evolving world of set-it-and-forget it information technology, there’s automation, and then there’s automation. Plenty of vendors claiming their technologies automate away labor are a tad deceptive; they may automate the beginning stage of a task, only to punt the ensuing grunt work right back into workers’ hands. We consulted some techies toiling in this domain and asked: Will the real automation please stand up?

In the space of security, governance and compliance, a standard automated monitoring system is too slow, according to Josh Stella (pictured, left), founder and chief executive officer of Fugue Inc. “The old model of: use a monitoring solution, throw a ticket over the wall, search through the pile of tickets — you might have hours, days, weeks where you’re exposed and your data leaks,” he said.

This is potentially hazardous for pretty much any organization, especially, those in the public and federal spaces, where compliance looms particularly large.

Stella and Peter O’Donoghue (pictured, right), vice president of application services at Unisys Corp., spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed automation, working with the public sector, and moving fast without breaking stuff. (* Disclosure below.)

Customers partial to full automation

Fugue is blending its automation services with partners — some who work deeply with public-sector customers — to provide full, legit automation of the entire infrastructure layer. In the above scenario, Fugue would take care of that hypothetical ticket in under a minute, Stella explained.

“It’s fire-and-forget-it infrastructure on cloud,” he said.

Unisys recently introduced CloudForte — an offering that simplifies management and governance of Amazon Web Services Inc. and facilitates its adoption at scale. The technology has Fugue automation baked in to reduce management hassles. For example, some public and federal customers have a tough time managing the finances of AWS cloud consumption due to transparency and contractual demands.

“Sounds trivial enough, but it’s really a thorn in the side of a lot of folks really trying to adopt cloud,” O’Donoghue said.

Automating those and other tasks ought to go as far as full-circle, end-to-end completion as possible, Stella explained. “There’s lots of kinds of automation that are partial,” he said. “Unless the system — like Fugue does — can fix everything — if there are any gaps in that, you’re back to manual world.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: Fugue Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Fugue nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE