Top 7 Benefits of IT Automation You Should Know

What is IT Automation?

Digital tools, processes, and workflows are essential for businesses to remain competitive in the market and place themselves ahead of the game. IT needs to support businesses by introducing digital transformation practices rapidly. As a result, IT teams have realized their workloads are rising, and it is not easy for IT leaders to achieve this without automating the IT processes and tasks. IT faces the challenge that organizations’ IT tools and technologies are fragmented and work in siloed environments. There exists a mind block to exchange information and manage dependencies between devices. This debilitates scalability and makes it difficult for IT ecosystems to scale faster than ever and provide quick responses to the business need for digital transformation.

IT Automation is the answer to this challenge. IT needs to connect disconnected tools and automate recurring, time consuming, complex, manual tasks to increase IT efficiencies, save time, and help reduce IT costs. IT Automation integrates and coordinates workflows, consolidates tools, and simplifies IT environments. IT automation, if implemented effectively, can free up IT resources for strategic activities. Furthermore, by lowering manual human interventions in the processes, tasks, and workflows, IT can reduce the chances of error and improve IT SLA management.

By 2024, enhancements in analytics and automatic remediation capabilities will refocus 30% of IT operations efforts, from support to continuous engineering¹.

How Does IT Automation Work?

IT automation creates a repeated automatic process that replaces an IT professional’s manual work. IT automation uses software, tools, applications, frameworks, and other IT systems to execute recurring tasks. For example, Windows PowerShell consolidates and merges all cmdlets, variables, resources, and other components into a single script that runs a series of instructions for automating the process that otherwise needs an administrator to do it manually by going through each line item. This simplifies workflow integrations, helping IT develop scalable architectures to meet business needs. IT automation technologies and applications like artificial intelligence and machine learning create intelligent processes that can act independently. Thus, it offers the ability to renovate IT ecosystems and the IT tasks team, making it a foundation for digital transformation plans and programs.

Historically, IT automation requires deep technical expertise, high-priced infrastructure, servers, and a lot of dependencies on IT resources and operations. These costs and resource-intensive measures put IT automation out of reach for businesses. With cloud platforms and tools like AI, and machine learning, IT automation is now within reach for most organizations.

Scope for IT Automation

IT Automation has a broader span and comprehends different IT tools, frameworks, and strategies. The scope for IT automation ranges from a particular IT process improvement to a complete and complex IT deployment relating to user experience, interaction and other trigger points. It can integrate IT services, processes, functions, and technology like automating the network component, infrastructure automation, content management, document processing, workflow automation, service desk process automation, and cloud resources provision. It can serve IT in automating the creation and deployment of standard operating environments (SOEs), application provisioning, application integration, and deployment. Important examples of IT automation include cloud infrastructure and provisioning, cloud resource provisioning, automating network configuration, IT incident management, IT ticketing systems, security incident monitoring, and responses. IT migration projects can also be automated, reducing the costly errors resulting from repetitive manual processes.

7 Benefits of IT Automation

IT automation requires businesses to manage and operate the complex IT landscape. Here are the benefits of IT automation:

1. Increasing speed and efficiency

Manual IT processes like server provisioning or deploying applications are intrinsically time-consuming. IT automation can speed up these operations, reducing the time-to-market for these services from weeks to hours. It delivers the speed and agility to keep pace with a constantly accelerating business environment. IT automation can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of IT efforts.

2. IT Cost savings

By needing fewer labor resources to complete tasks, IT automation can reduce infrastructure costs by optimizing resource utilization, enhancing IT productivity, and decreasing costs associated with human error. Automating repeatable IT tasks, such as application configuration deployment and integration and update management, can help IT save cost by operating more efficiently, making fewer errors, and reducing headcount. Your IT team can accomplish more tasks and use the extra time to focus on primary business objectives and strategies.

3. Accuracy and trust with confidence

With IT automation, the error is low because the automated process, task, or workflow is programmed to perform the same task repeatedly, without mistakes. IT automation enables an IT professional to configure and set up a series of operations to run countless times in the same manner without error. IT can deploy its applications confidently, and resources can be requested upon demand, and be up and operating via a transparent and standard approach that all their IT staff members can appreciate and trust. Automating repeatable operational tasks, such as application deployment and service fulfillment, change and release management, and patch management can help IT operations save money by operating more efficiently, making fewer errors, and reducing headcount.

4. Enhanced security and compliance

Automated processes involve fewer human interactions that reduce the risk of security breaches. It can define security standards and enforce security and compliance policies as an automated step in the process. For regulatory compliance, the IT automation strategy establishes consistency in IT operations. Leveraging IT automation to apply standardized, security processes and workflows makes compliance and auditing simpler and more effective. IT automation algorithms can examine modifications in compliance frameworks and update policies with the appropriate controls to achieve compliance. As a result, IT need not worry about manual updates and deploy compliance policies each time industry standards change.

5. Ease of integration and interoperability

IT automation offers integration and interoperability with other systems, software, and frameworks across diverse IT environments. It integrates with higher-level orchestration tools to roll tasks together under governed workflows. This also automates the information flow between different and disparate systems, which would otherwise require manual and duplicate efforts.

6. Enhanced service reliability and availability

IT managers can improve reliability and service availability by eliminating mundane, manual tasks. It brings about incredible reliability in service delivery and availability. As automation tasks, processes and workflow are designed with the quality metrics and standardized operating systems with the defined quality. It easily reconfigures and revises the plan to accommodate new availability requirements. Furthermore, by systematizing recovery systems, monitoring, and automated alerts and notification, IT operations can reduce service downtime and ensure quicker disaster recovery. It becomes easy to deliver IT services more rapidly and constantly by focusing on adding business rather than maintaining the management system.

7. Boost IT performance

IT automation helps perform IT tasks more quickly and efficiently and improves performance without adding more staff. The processes and tasks operate in a 24×7 mode, resulting in better output. Automated end-end processes help gain operational efficiencies without the IT team’s involvement to develop a fix for every technical issue.

Challenges of IT automation

There are a few challenges in IT automation. Implementing IT automation does not guarantee that it will work as expected; you need to take care of security, compliance, subject matter expertise, integration, and many more aspects. You also need to ensure that enough infrastructure is available to develop and deploy automation. IT requires competency and expertise for IT automation to translate IT actions into specific practical steps with full customization and control. Organizations must enable their IT teams with the right skills and processes to ensure that IT automation is consistent. IT automation would help if you had multiple and varied rounds of testing to ensure that the automated IT process is error-free and meets the needs. Also, you might face people’s resistance toward IT automation. It helps convey the positive attributes of IT automation to the team, highlighting that it allows people to move away from more labor-intensive and manual tasks, thus increasing their productivity.

IT Automation Platform – Making your business all set to implement IT automation

For automating the IT processes, you require– a new and innovative platform to automate the complex IT tasks needed to keep your business process running and available. To cater to your business automation needs, Hexaware brings you Tensai^® – an IT automation platform that offers a robust and economically sustainable platform with enhanced capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). Hexaware’s Tensai^® is one such automation platform for IT automation that has been custom-built to address the current and future automation requirements. It is built using open-source components and comes with reusable components and scripts. It equips an enterprise with:

• Agility through Build-to-Release Automation
• Efficiency through Release-to-Retire Automation
• Experience through Employee Services Automation

For more information on Hexaware’s Tensai^®, please visit-

Tensai^® for Digital Run

Reference:

¹Gartner’s IT Automation Trends for 2022