Distributed across various layers of IT infrastructure, a typical IT ecosystem contains a magnitude of components that require several repetitive, manual processes to maintain, manage and update. The fact is, manual provisioning and infrastructure configuration are slow, inefficient and prone to errors.
Enterprises automate processes that improve the speed and agility of application delivery without raising complexity or costs.
What is Infra Automation and why do you need it?
IT infra automation aims to simplify IT operations while improving speed and agility by enabling IT departments to perform these tasks autonomously. It enables IT staff to focus on strategic processes that add business value, reducing the manual effort involved in provisioning and managing IT Infra.
It has the potential to improve every aspect of your operations. It can make deployments efficient while cutting costs by reclaiming resources. Automation helps in digital transformation by providing user-centric solutions, improving decision making & enhancing the user experience. It has helped IT professionals make new innovations by using tools that have replaced slow, manual, and repetitive workflows into fast, scalable and responsive delivery. Automation is empowering businesses to be creative, agile, flexible and also compassionate, by further augmenting human capabilities and the business scope.
Enterprises need to consider implementing solutions that prevent:
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Slow provisioning, response and turnaround times
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Lack of visibility in tracking assets across your IT
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Runaway Costs that most enterprises struggle to keep in check
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Wasted resources that hurt performance
Key Features and Benefits of Automation Tools
Automation eliminates manual provisioning and handling of IT. This in turn enables the rapid development of secure, scalable solutions and services.
Some key benefits of using automated tools include:
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Reducing errors usually associated with manual provisioning
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Reducing IT complexity to optimize the costs and effort involved in managing IT
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Enhancing workflows using tools that enable repeatability, predictability and accuracy
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Speeding up delivery by autonomously executing repetitive workflows across multiple IT nodes
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Improving Service Availability through self-healing solutions
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Improving SLA Compliance by reducing the cycle time or MTTR
Think Before you Leap
The deployment of any tool requires careful planning. Not every component can be automated. An organization with a typical IT setup usually deploys automation solutions that help with:
Orchestration
Includes automating different processes and managing configurations across multiple nodes
Resource provisioning
Enables systems to meet business demands by automatically scaling resources across environments
Configuration management
Helps simplify provisioning using predefined scripts and best practices with the help of a configuration management tool
IT migration
Allows companies to move systems, applications and data faster
Application deployment
Entails seamless CI/CD helps move from commit to build to testing to deployment fast
Security & compliance requirements
Lets security teams define compliance and risk management policies to provide secure IT
Popular IT Infrastructure Automation Solutions
Organizations can jumpstart their journey with a few of these popular tools:
An open-source tool that uses prewritten projects to manage infra
A declarative tool that uses preconfigured modules to configure resources
An open-source server management and configuration tool that uses a DSL for automation
An enterprise dashboard and analytic platform that allows for complete IT automation
A data-driven orchestration tool for infrastructure management and automation
Runbook Automation
Runbook automation (RBA) is the ability to define, build, orchestrate, manage, and report on workflows that support system and network operational processes. A runbook workflow can potentially interact with all types of infrastructure elements, such as applications, databases, and hardware. These are mostly scripts like Powershell , Python and others.
DevOps and the Future of IT
To gain agility through automated tooling, organizations need to build a culture of trust and transparency.
Your experts need to be able to understand what the automated tools are up to. The benefits of these tools are that they help reduce repetitive tasks and enable remote execution across different operating systems' technology stacks.
Infrastructure as Code
Abstracting the management of the infrastructure is a critical aspect of automation. This can be accomplished using the same principles that govern coding in DevOps. It is a concept known as infrastructure as code (IaC).
What IaC Enables
IaC allows IT teams to create target environments using configuration files using JSON or YAML files. These files are machine-readable and rely on declarative/imperative commands. Additionally, they manage policies through centralized templates and automation libraries.
This simplifies resource and application configuration. Furthermore, IaC also helps Enterprises achieve uniformity across different deployment environments.
The Age of Hyper-Automation is Here
Infra efficiency is measured by the levels of tasks automated and reduced human intervention. While the lifecycle of certain processes is limited, scope those that are repetitive.
Gartner predicts that organizations will refocus over 30% of their IT operations on analytics and automated tooling. The need for automated solutions in Infrastructure Provisioning continues to grow.
Enhance your operations with automated tools
Superior business outcomes depend on accelerating processes. These processes depend on a faster and cost-effective way of allocating IT. Enterprises realize that automated tools are the key. Most of them have been incrementally implementing automated tools over years. But this approach means they lose out on the full business value that automation offers.
We take a holistic approach. InspiriSYS enables businesses to make changes to their infrastructure quickly, reliably and safely as per their changing needs.
Why InspiriSYS?
Our decades of experience are just one of the aspects setting us apart. With deep expertise in various types of solutions, InspiriSYS is uniquely positioned to automate every stage of your IT. With us as your trusted partner, enterprises gain reliable, optimized IT Infra while saving costs.
We have expertise across open source as well as proprietary tools that can automate your IT Infrastructure seamlessly. Get in touch with us to learn more.
