Autonomic Computing promises to make both our hardware and software more agile and secure, by allowing them to self-manage themselves. Four critical aspects of autonomous computing are: 1) self-protecting: ability to diagnose and protect the resource from attacks, 2) self-healing: ability to recover from failures and attacks, 3) self-configuring: ability to reconfigure in order to become more efficient, and 4) self-optimizing: the ability to constantly tweak the parameters in order to perform the task at hand in a more effective and efficient manner.

While IBM has led in this topic, many have begun to contribute in areas related to server reconfiguration and software that heals itself. Please see the following links for more information:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/autonomic/
http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic/manifesto/