The Importance of IT Operations Automation
Visit any major online retailer, and you’ll see a common theme. Whether it’s Amazon, eBay or even Sears, the consumer experience is completely automated. It’s not just about having a searchable catalog – you can get automatic recommendations, compare products with a few clicks, easily add items to your shopping cart and check out in seconds. And, once you’ve placed your order, you can often track it right to your front door.
The importance of automation is clear. Without automation, online retailing just wouldn’t work, and neither would just about anything else on the Web. Just imagine if you needed an army of people behind the scenes to handle every customer click – it would be excruciatingly slow and the cost would be prohibitive.
However, here’s the embarrassing truth. While IT has automated a huge range of applications – both business and consumer – many IT organizations still manage these services manually. For example, when something goes wrong with a service, IT staff have to plow through huge amounts of monitoring data to find out why. And, when they need to reconfigure something, they end up making the change manually – whether that’s upgrading software, modifying LDAP directory permissions or provisioning new cloud resources.
IT organizations pay a huge price for these manual processes – and so do the businesses that they support. Unless IT operations automation is embraced, businesses will continue to suffer as they struggle to keep the lights on.
Here are the top four benefits of IT operations automation:
IT Operations Automation Benefit #1: Greater Speed and Efficiency
Manual processes are inherently slow. In the past, this was less of a concern because the pace of IT itself was slower. However, that’s no longer the case. IT is expected to respond instantly to business needs, that’s why they’re moving towards IT operations automation. They can no longer afford to take three weeks to fire up a VM in a private cloud. These types of delays are just not acceptable – they act as a brake on the business itself.
Let’s be clear. Rapidly increasing digitalization is a driving force in the modern enterprise. It underpins productivity, revenue growth and customer satisfaction. That’s why IT is embracing the cloud – to deliver the speed and agility needed to keep pace with a constantly accelerating business environment. However, unless IT itself becomes more agile and automated, there’s no point. It’s like putting a racecar engine into a horse-drawn carriage. IT operations automation software enables enterprises to bring their IT operations automation ideas to life to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their efforts.
IT Operations Automation Benefit #2: Improved Service Availability
Businesses continue to be plagued by IT service outages. One study showed that outages cost North American businesses $700 billion a year. When mission-critical services go down – such as e-commerce portals, contact centers or supply chain management systems – productivity, revenues and customer confidence all suffer. And yet, many IT organizations still rely on manual processes to keep these services up and running – and that’s a huge problem.
Today, there are intelligent IT operations automation tools that can automatically identify the root cause of service outages. These technologies can also pinpoint potential issues before service is affected. As a result, they dramatically reduce both the frequency and duration of service outages. Our experience at Optanix has shown that these IT operations automation tools can cut restoration times in half and proactively identify more than 90% of issues before there is an end-user impact.
IT Operations Automation Benefit #3: Increased Accuracy
Whenever someone makes a manual change to an IT environment, it’s easy to get it wrong. Even if changes are carefully planned and go through a rigorous change approval process, ultimately it’s a human that actually makes the change, and humans make mistakes. In fact, these types of errors are responsible for a significant proportion of service outages. Even if the service isn’t immediately affected, errors still have to be detected and corrected – resulting in a significant amount of rework.
By automating configuration and provisioning processes, IT organizations can dramatically increase accuracy and thereby reduce the potential for mistakes. Unlike humans, automated processes do things repeatedly and reliably. Of course, it’s not feasible to automate every change. For example, while it’s technically possible, there’s no point in automating “one-off” changes. However, when the same type of change is made over and over again, automating IT operations dramatically reduces both risks and costs.
When IT organizations use manual processes, visibility is a major problem. There’s no easy way to track activities when information is spread out over innumerable emails and spreadsheets. Even when an IT organization uses some sort of recording system (e.g., a ticketing system) the system still relies on manual updates, leading to incomplete and inconsistent data. As a result, it’s incredibly difficult to measure, analyze and improve processes, or to meet regulatory and internal compliance requirements.
IT operations automation aims to deliver dramatically increased visibility. For instance, when an incident management process is automated, every step is recorded. This makes it simple to analyze trends, identify process bottlenecks and drive proactive processes such as problem management to prevent incidents from reoccurring. Ultimately, this leads to improved service quality, reduced incident volumes and lower operational costs – and incident management is just one example of where automating IT operations creates benefits for an organization.
IT Operations Automation Benefit #4: Faster Innovation
Today, IT organizations are increasingly expected to partner with their business, helping to increase enterprise velocity and competitiveness. However, the reality is that 80% of IT’s resources are typically consumed with day-to-day operations. Further, IT is expected to step up to the mark while keeping a tight lid on costs, and budgets aren’t even the only limiting factor they face. It’s incredibly difficult to find and retain high-performing IT staff. Even if an IT organization has the budget to innovate, squandering skilled resources on mundane operational activities just isn’t an option.
IT operations automation doesn’t directly drive innovation. By its nature, automation is applied to well-established, high-volume processes. However, by eliminating time-consuming manual work, IT operations automation frees up resources to drive innovation.
And, given the overwhelming and increasing business demands placed on IT organizations, that’s just one more reason why automating IT operations should be top of the agenda for every IT operations team.
Explore IT operations automation software solutions from Optanix.