8 benefits of automating IT infrastructure
Every organization out there is today trying to increase its operational efficiency while reducing IT costs. Starting from application release to customer support, every single IT aspect needs faster solutions that reduce the amount of manual work and deliver a fantastic experience. More and more companies turn to agile, flexible, and quickly scalable technology foundations to achieve their business goals and keep up with competitors.
This is where IT infrastructure automation comes in. Automation accelerates the entire business process, not just infrastructure.
In the previous article, we covered the basics of IT infrastructure automation. Let's take a closer look at infrastructure automation benefits.
8 benefits of infrastructure automation
1. Significant cost savings
Automation is the primary driver for reducing IT costs without compromising the quality of services. It helps to remove the manual effort to optimize your IT resource capacity. Automation also allows for better control of resource allocation and utilization across all of the business processes.
The truth is that IT infrastructure automation is essential for optimizing both traditional IT and modern, cloud infrastructure acquired through digital transformation initiatives. But it's crucial to pick the right automation tool for efficient infrastructure management.
2. Faster DevOps adoption
DevOps is a best practice that fosters agility companies need for releasing products of higher quality, faster. And automation is at the heart of DevOps.
That's why adopting DevOps and integrating it across the entire range of functionalities requires a high level of infrastructure automation.
To build a properly functioning DevOps, you need infrastructure automation that affects every single stage in the software development lifecycle.
3. Improved user experience via self-service portals
Self-service portals and service catalogs are now expanding beyond IT processes to match the needs of different business areas. For example, you can find them in human resources for calculating benefits and compensation or in supplier management for contract renewal and bid reviews.
Self-service solutions accelerate productivity and increase service delivery. To take full advantage of such self-service portals, organizations need to embrace business process automation.
The idea is to automate every repeatable workflow in the process to make self-service portals more productive and deliver real value to business teams.
4. Reaping the benefits of cloud computing
While most organizations today use public cloud infrastructures to some extent, they still struggle to use best-of-breed solutions to the fullest. In fact, many untapped benefits are waiting in the cloud that could provide incredible value to businesses. Organizations have to reap all possible benefits of cloud automation to facilitate operations.
By taking advantage of infrastructure automation solutions, businesses can discover new methods for making the most of their cloud infrastructures (not to mention slashing their cost).
Automation is a necessary prerequisite for gaining more control over cloud activities. Such a tool can divide workflows and allocate them across different clouds used in the enterprise - using public, private, on-premises data, and hybrid arrangements.
5. Programming infrastructure
Today, data centers are the keystone of IT infrastructure for many organizations. However, the role they play changes because of the higher availability of cloud storage. Organizations can use hosted sites and social storage platforms spread across various provider facilities.
To make the most of this opportunity, they need to develop the capability for orchestrating and automating infrastructure facilities. Automation is what allows programming storage as a service through these hosted sites, social platforms, and public cloud services.
6. Bimodal IT
IT has always served as a strategic partner for any business process. While it continues to fulfill the set Service Level Agreements, the IT department can also provide better security controls, maintain operational capabilities, and reduce the cost of running the business.
Bimodal IT refers to the management of two separate modes of IT delivery. While one is focused on stability, the other promotes agility.
This is a great solution for businesses that want to catch up with the advancing digital world. In this context, automation can serve as a catalyst for transitioning from traditional IT methods to bimodal IT. In this scenario, automation accelerates IT processes and provides the required stability.
7. More efficient workflows
By implementing infrastructure automation in Continuous Delivery, organizations can automate a wide range of jobs with greater accuracy and efficiency. A manual process shouldn't slow down your team.
Note that every task within a given workflow can have separate dependencies to make sure that they are only executed when specific conditions are met. For example, you can set a condition to provision the server only after specific tests are done and achieve greater cost savings.
8. Faster updates
Today, customers are used to companies delivering better and newer products on a regular basis. That's why it's so important for both IT and software development teams to use infrastructure automation.
Automation solutions help to streamline the process of releasing new software and reduce the amount of time it takes to fix bugs and other issues that impact the customer experience. By rolling updates out faster, you will ensure that customers are satisfied with your solutions.
Conclusion
There are many infrastructure automation benefits, however, if you want to make full use of your traditional IT and the cloud environment then you need the right tool for orchestration. But there is more than one infrastructure automation tool that you can use, you have to carefully plan your automation journey and pick the right one.
Different cloud platforms will need different automation scripts, maybe another cloud provider will be more suited for your needs. Complex infrastructure requires expert know-how and experience. If you need help, just contact us and we will be happy to help you with your automation projects.
Interested in automation? Check out our expert guide to RPA in finance!
