Automation in IT involves using software to create repeatable processes that allow a task to be completed without the need for human interaction.
From a business’ perspective, IT automation can involve taking repetitive, manual processes out of the hands of employees, freeing up their time for complicated IT bottlenecks within your organisation, while also reducing error and accelerating delivery across the board.
“Automation gives the administrator tools to effectively deploy scalable workloads, without a commensurate increase in staff.” - Ned Bellavance, director of cloud solutions at Anexinet.
As a general rule, the vast majority of IT tasks have some level of applicable automation.
It will likely have the capacity to aid in provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, security and more. In the modern environment, automation proves itself the viable option for dealing with the speed and scale of IT issues that teams are currently managing.
At elfware, we’ve taken on large projects with publicly listed companies across the globe. IT Automation allows us to tackle complex problems quickly and effectively.
Cost Savings
First and foremost, automation in any context reduces the need for manual labour. Particularly for automation in IT, engineers can be stuck spending needless hours on configuring thousands of similar servers (as an example), manually. A team also runs the risk of human error in this case, having similarly negative impacts on the cost of a project.
Time Savings
By automating the most repetitive and laborious tasks, a team of engineers frees up a considerable amount of their time. They can rather automate basic, time consuming tasks and focus on higher level, complicated issues, or strategic work (at elfware, it means our engineers can spend more time focusing on improving and adding features to the elfCafé platform, improving our value proposition without hampering productivity). An automated environment has the capacity to reduce delivery time for projects from months to a matter of days.
Reduced Human Error
This was mentioned previously in cost-savings, but still proves one of the biggest benefits of automation. It ensures consistency throughout large projects by taking out the capacity for human error. Once an automation environment has been effectively developed, businesses can focus on complex, higher order tasks without fearing the significant impediment of human error in more repetitive, time-consuming errors.
Efficient Application Deployment
With Automation, organisations are able to confidently deploy applications at an accelerated speed, configuring necessary services from the outset, while still being transparent and understandable for an entire IT team. This is due to their capacity to systematically progress from commit and build to testing and finally deployment.
System Availability
A priority of IT operations is ensuring system availability. The automation of several tasks; save and recovery systems, system monitoring and remote communication, can significantly reduce downtime and efficiently facilitate incident management.
Now, it’s tough to pick out any negatives of Automation in IT, because if done right it can have such prolific positive impacts on the performance of an IT team. But, the key is that it has to be done right. There are certainly numerous issues that can prevent this from happening.
It’s Automated, Not Intelligent
Automation involves establishing a process through which tasks can be repeated and completed effectively without human intervention. But, the automated system is still only capable of doing what a human programmed it to do, it is not intelligent. Therefore, if there is a fault in the original programming at the hands of the engineer, then it may not be able to effectively automate the completion of tasks.
Flexibility Relies on Continued System Updates
Processes evolve over time as technology and IT infrastructure grows and changes. Automated processes can be easily left idle and fall behind the times. IT teams need to ensure the continued monitoring and updating of automation systems so as to ensure its continued relevance.
Automation is a Long Term Game
Teams can’t expect to be seeing results in the first few weeks of an automation effort. It requires a significant investment in terms of time due to the initial development and a trial and error phase. Rather, over the space of months a team can optimize complicated processes which will result in significant savings and productivity gains in the long term.
IT process automation already provides a team with the capacity to vastly improve productivity and reduce the unnecessary costs of employees’ hours and human error – but the future of automation may have even further positive impacts due to machine learning.
While it’s still early days for machine learning, as our technology gradually advances, we may reach a time where automation software can make decisions that would otherwise be the responsibility of an engineer.
It's hard to predict the benefits, but an automated system that can learn and grow could have numerous positive impacts on the work of an IT team.
