by Operations groups I suspect are going to have real problems soon, and not from the usual causes of automation. It is very common for operations groups to not only monitor the servers, but take on trivial tasks that need to be done out of hours, sometimes even during the business day in an effort to alleve the workload on the system administrator.
Here’s the problem. Many more systems now store data that may be SOX impacting or some similar law that strictly regulates access. The system administrators themselves have a strong need to access the box, and usually are a fairly concrete and small team, but operations groups are much larger, maybe even offshored. I suspect that the access implications have not been fully thought out of giving these groups the access to do some of these root tasks.
I don’t claim to have fully thought this through, it is still at the stage of “Hey, I this could be interesting!” Maybe others don’t have their operations groups taking on more and more tasks like I’m seeing, which would make life easier.