Your digital transformation strategy seems to hold up fine, but something appears to be missing. You’ve done your homework and discussed your needs and concerns with your IT team, and everything seems to be operating smoothly. However, you are plagued by the feeling that you need to zhuzh things up a bit. Look around again; have you considered infrastructure automation?
That’s right. Automating your infrastructure is a thing and it can change the landscape of your enterprise and revolutionize the way you deliver products and services. Before you decide this is something you want for your enterprise, let’s take a long hard look at what it means to automate enterprise infrastructure, and how this can give your business a boost.
What Exactly is Infrastructure Automation Anyways?
Breaking down the two concepts may be the easiest way to understand the idea of automating one’s infrastructure. To start with, what does infrastructure imply? An enterprise’s IT infrastructure refers to all the different elements needed to manage its IT. This includes the software (and all its applications), hardware, operating systems, networking components, and the like. You can even download various infrastructure-related products and run them on top of components already in use.
As for automation, chances are you are already familiar with the idea. This involves the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human interference or involvement. Thanks to automation, repetitive tasks no longer have to be performed by humans, which comes with a whole host of benefits: better speed, better productivity, and a decrease in human error.
But automation goes beyond this. It can be used to scale environments when required, deploy continuous delivery and integration, and deal with workflows. As a result, hyper-automation, robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and machine learning are taking the industry by storm, moving from the niche to the mainstream.
What does all this make infrastructure automation? A simple definition would be the use of technology to control infrastructure elements (hardware, software, OS, etc.) with reduced interference from humans. It can also be described as a collection of processes to decrease the scale of manual effort required to maintain the infrastructure of an organization.
Why Automate Your Infrastructure?
Infrastructure automation has many benefits, especially for larger enterprises. As your business grows, so will the infrastructure holding things up. In addition, your infrastructure will become more complex, which makes managing things more difficult. This is where automating things become important.
The problem arises when employees and staff struggle to manage and maintain increasingly complex infrastructure. Because of this, they cannot patch software, update things on time, or even deliver necessary resources when required. It also adds a burden on employees who cannot perform mission-critical tasks on time, or carry out more innovative processes and operations that the enterprise may need.
With limited time and resources, the best way to go is with automation. Basic management is covered without the need for human interaction as configuring, deploying, and similar tasks can be automated. This simplifies processes and operations and more importantly provides greater control and visibility over one’s infrastructure altogether.
By automating repetitive tasks, IT personnel have more time and resources to focus on more pressing matters. They can use this time to focus on strategic tasks that require creative and innovative thinking, which in turn drives more value for the enterprise. This turn boosts revenue, cuts costs, and improves things like productivity and efficiency for the employees.
What Should You Automate?
Nowadays, most enterprises have replaced traditional infrastructure with either cloud infrastructure, or some kind of hybrid model. Most commonly, the following areas are automated for maximum effect. For starters, you can automate the configuration of your infrastructure. This will offer predictable processes for maintaining configurations across operating systems to improve consistency and increase uptime. Another common area to automate is overall system maintenance. This will help IT teams manage vast, complex infrastructures, freeing them from dull, time-consuming tasks and allowing them to focus on more rewarding and strategically important projects
Advantages of Infrastructure Automation
The following are just a couple of benefits that infrastructure automation can bring to your enterprise:
- Optimized costs: Automating infrastructure will cut down on unnecessary costs, so IT will be less of a liability when it comes to costs
- Decreased human error: Automation reduces errors and vulnerabilities, allowing IT to refocus its aims toward the overall development
- Less complexity: Automating repetitive tasks can lead to simpler processes and operations
- Boost in workflows: Automation is a handy tool that allows for predictability and accuracy when performing IT provisioning tasks and workflows
- Faster provisioning: Automating tasks and processes can make it faster and easier for IT to provision different operations and tools when needed
In a Nutshell
Once you understand what infrastructure automation is and what it entails, it is up to you to decide whether it is something that your enterprise needs. As a rule of thumb, smaller organizations do not need to automate their infrastructure, while it is something that larger enterprises must do to make up for the complexity of their architecture. The next step, naturally, is to implement the automation process. This will depend on the kind of existing infrastructure you have, as well as the needs of your enterprise. And if you aren’t sure whether automating infrastructure is something you need to do, the consultants at PlektonLabs will be glad to point you in the right direction.
