The Role of IT Automation in a Company’s Success
In a previous post, we talked about how IT teams are at capacity. This is a challenge to companies that want to compete in today’s digital landscape.
Companies need to speed up the development and delivery of their applications in a secure way. This constant need for speed means IT teams have to scale faster than ever before.
The Solution? IT Automation.
IT automation is the use of software to create repeatable, automated processes and tasks. It reduces or replaces the manual effort of operating and managing IT infrastructure. It also enables IT teams to overcome error-prone and time-consuming work of manual processes, while improving speed, efficiency, and security.
Here are IT services that can be automated.
- Service and change request systems/management
- Processes and workflows (build, deployment, and management)
- Server health checks
- System backups and batch reporting
- Network monitoring and testing
- Incident response and resolution
- Provisioning and configuration management
- Patch deployment and management
- Security and compliance processes
- Managing access and file systems
- DevOps pipelines
And that’s scratching the surface.
Automation is at the center of IT’s continuous evolution. It is a necessity for any business operating in the digital space. It has the capacity to achieve the following:
Reduce the manpower needed to maintain and scale IT efforts
Create flexibility to continue evolving with more speed and less error
Reduce IT overhead and enable the IT team to focus on innovative projects
While many IT services can and should be automated, two of the most important are security and DevOps.
Security
IT automation can help tighten security by automating several IT security services. Automating these security processes can strengthen security at an organization.
Security services to automate include incident investigation. IT can validate, investigate, and resolve threats with much greater speed and precision. By implementing automated processes to collect data from multiple sources, investigative security processes are more efficient and effective.
Other security processes to consider automating are
- Threat monitoring, containment, and remediation
- Collecting, consolidating, and analyzing log data
- Patch management
- Audit reporting
- Malware and insider threat detection
- Early breach detection
- Compliance analytics and reporting
- Log and event data collection
- Alerts
- Incident response
- Intrusion detection
- Identity and access management
- Mitigation functions
DevOps
Automation is vital to optimizing an organization’s DevOps efforts. By automating testing and deployment pipelines, DevOps teams can increase speed to market. Automation in DevOps shortens the software development lifecycle, increases speed, reliability, and consistency of development efforts.
What are some examples of DevOps processes that can be automated?
- App deployment
- Management, distribution, and scheduling of containers
- Infrastructure configuration and management
- Data testing and validation
- Provisioning and application deployment
- Compliance and audit processes
- Build server and deployment process
- Development, testing, and production infrastructure
- App maintenance, upgrades, and transitions
- API testing (unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, regression tests, mock tests, etc.)
- End-to-end response
- SAP processing
- Integrated file transfers
- Disaster recovery
- Workload automation
- External data integration and analysis
The Takeaway
Manual IT processes generate a lot of overhead. They are time-intensive, error-prone, and not repeatable. In short, they slow the time to value. When IT operates this way, teams can spend most of the workday on these routine manual tasks to keep running. By automating processes IT operations can become lean and efficient, and move towards digital transformation.
As a driver of digital transformation, automation can create a scalable and efficient IT environment. This efficiency creates the agility that enables the responsiveness needed in a competitive landscape. But also, it optimizes resources and creating room for true innovation.
To design and plan a strategic IT automation effort, team up with a proven technology provider like JDK Technologies.