What is IT infrastructure automation and how to implement it?
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IT infrastructure automation is a buzzword topic today. According to Gartner, by 2024, developments in analytics and automatic remediation capabilities will refocus 30% of IT - from support to continuous engineering. By that time, 40% of products and platform teams will be using AI ops for automated change risk analysis in DevOps pipelines to reduce the unplanned downtime by a smashing 20%.
But since the infrastructure is an invisible engine running our applications, sometimes it's hard to correctly understand its value – and, by extension, the value of automating it.
In this article, we explain what IT infrastructure automation is, what its key components are, and why companies should start automating their infrastructures.
What is IT infrastructure automation?
Infrastructure automation is a collection of processes and tools used to reduce the need for manual support of workloads in public clouds, on-premises IT infrastructure, or hybrid environments. Infrastructure automation utilizes automation solutions to manage software, hardware, networks, operating systems, and storage needed to deliver IT services with minimal human intervention.
What is the goal of IT infrastructure automation?
The goal of automating IT infrastructure is to make all the activities related to the resources we mentioned above as efficient, fast, and hands-on as possible.
Today, many everyday functions that IT is responsible for could be easily automated with special solutions. This, in turn, would free up IT employees to address more mission-critical issues and architect the infrastructure for the future.
By automating repetitive tasks, the IT department can focus on important strategic tasks that provide added value to the organization. That's why IT infrastructure automation could potentially improve almost every aspect of the public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. It makes workload deployments more efficient, cuts costs, and removes unnecessary waste.
What are the components of an IT infrastructure?
Software
Software refers to all the applications used by the organization, starting with web servers and content management systems (CMSs) to operating systems like Windows, macOS, or Linux. But software connects to hardware as well – for example, an operating system is responsible for managing system resources as well as hardware. It makes all the connections between the software and physical resources that actually do the work.
Hardware
By hardware, we mean data centers, personal computers, servers, routers, switches, and other types of equipment used by businesses today. You could easily include the facility that houses and powers your data center as part of your infrastructure as well.
Networking
Networking refers to all of the interconnected components of the network that allow network management, operations, and communication between internal and external systems. The network itself consists of elements such as network enablement, Internet connectivity, firewalls, and security but also hardware elements like tables, routers, and switches.
What are the different types of IT infrastructure?
Traditional infrastructure
In a traditional infrastructure, all the components such as data storage, data centers, and other equipment are owned and managed by the business within its facilities. This type of infrastructure is usually quite expensive to run. It requires investment in large amounts of hardware such as servers but also the physical space to store them – not to mention the resources for powering and cooling them.
Cloud infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure is infrastructure based on components and resources related to cloud computing. We can divide this infrastructure type into several subtypes:
- Private cloud – In a private cloud, the organization uses resources that are dedicated exclusively to it.
- Public cloud – In this alternative, you rent cloud infrastructures from cloud service providers such as AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Alibaba, and others.
- Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud – By implementing workload orchestration, portability, and management across multiple cloud environments, companies can create a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment.
- Hyper-converged infrastructure - This type of infrastructure allows managing compute, network, and data storage resources from one single interface. Thanks to software-defined compute, and data storage brought together, your business can support more modern workloads with scalable architectures enabled by industry-standard hardware.
Why should companies automate their IT infrastructures?
In general, automation is an excellent solution for tasks that are well understood, repetitive and tedious to accomplish manually. These tasks are also discrete and require a high level of standardization and/or governance.
Here's why implementing IT infrastructure automation is a good idea.
Accelerating the speed of provisioning
If your customers are complaining about slow response and turnaround times, you might be in need of some automation aimed at improving customer satisfaction levels. Companies that take days or weeks from the time when a request is made to the moment when the service is fully deployed are missing out on market opportunities. Waiting might inspire users to turn to other offerings.
The smaller the size of your company, the easier it is to manage things manually. As your infrastructure increases in scale and IT needs grow, manual management techniques will become less effective.
They will inevitably lead to a growing backlog of infrastructure-related requests. And how can administrators provision what's needed when they're limited by lack of automation, outdated processes, and the added complexity of some types of infrastructure like a hybrid cloud? This is not a method for providing SLAs that users are expecting.
Greater visibility
If your company has problems with tracking assets across the IT infrastructure and wrapping effective processes around requests for assets is hard, you might benefit from automating your infrastructure.
For example, when internal users begin to purchase public cloud instances using their own credit cards, your organization might lose control of its intellectual property. Such shadow IT projects occur when IT departments are operating with legacy infrastructures and processes – and now want to take advantage of innovative solutions.
All of this creates data management and agility challenges, leaving your organization incapable of quickly delivering IT services to satisfy its business requirements. That's why many businesses are turning to the public cloud.
How to optimize for cost, performance and achieve compliance? You need to have full control over your assets, maintain visibility across workloads, and understand where people are placing them (not to mention where in fact, they should be placing them).
Cost optimization
Many organizations struggle to understand the true cost of their infrastructure resource requests, usage or even attribute the right cost to the right business units.
At the same time, executives expect to be kept informed about costs and have the ability to attribute costs to each and every line of business. How else are you going to optimize your costs?
By moving to a service-based pricing model, you can start to create a culture of accountability. Cost optimization will become the responsibility of everyone requesting services. That way, users will no longer see these resources as something available free of charge.
Consequently, IT will no longer be seen as a liability that generates enormous costs but as a real asset. But automation is just one of the strategies for optimizing infrastructure costs, we've written a whole article about reducing cloud costs.
This is also the path toward implementing an IT and service model where you are no longer owning physical IT assets but renting resources on an as-needed basis. Lifecycle management is important here as well because resource leases should be retired as soon as they're no longer required or stop providing any value. This is where automation can help enormously and keep your cost at bay.
Virtual tool sprawl
Another aspect where automation comes in handy is for efficient usage and allocation of all of the cloud resources. This is especially important if you're using the public cloud. Many instances end up underused and overprovisioned. Companies typically go over their cloud budgets by 23%.
Most of the time, virtual environments simply grow organically. If users see that a workload is free of charge, you will quickly start dealing with virtual sprawl. What you need is to automate the decommissioning process where physical resources become depleted and stop as soon as they're not needed anymore.
All the workloads that are underused, not used at all, or overprovisioned need to be brought to the attention of the administration team and remediated in some way. Naturally, the best way is to automatically deal with all that.
Automation helps to find waste
When deploying workloads in a non-standardized and inconsistent manner, you will see an impact on the performance of your infrastructure. Other issues are added complexity and cost.
Overallocation is a common problem organizations face when using public cloud resources. By reclaiming them, you get to achieve a higher over workload density and reduce costs.
Over-provisioning and under-provisioning are equally threatening. An automated solution can easily identify poorly performing workloads and automatically take action to either delete resources or allocate additional ones.
Reduced human error
Automation is a great way to reduce vulnerabilities and errors typically seen during manual provisioning. Automated processes allow teams to focus on core development, rather than wasting time with iterative steps that will never be perfected.
Enterprises have to reduce the possibility of any mistakes to a minimum, we see many breaches and attacks because we are humans and we make mistakes. Robots and scripts are different, a program will not make a typo or miss a line of code.
Reduced complexity
Automation is a great way to reduce the cost and effort of implementing IT infrastructure. By automating repetitive tasks, operations teams can focus their attention on known complexities while also improving user experiences with predictive frameworks that allow them to optimize for better performance in order to get things done faster than ever before!
Managing complex IT requires more people and investment in technical training. This means that complex environments cost more. Maintaining multi-tier systems can also become very difficult as they require much more attention to stay available and secure.
Enhanced workflows
Automation is a powerful tool that allows for repeatability, predictability and accuracy when performing IT provisioning tasks. The operations teams only need to set the desired conditions and automation tools will execute on them. Such tools remove the guesswork from any given process so the specialists can focus their efforts where they matter most!
90% of enterprises have already adopted the cloud for their infrastructure, but not all of them are using its full potential. Thanks to automation they can grow their business and speed up a number of processes. It’s the next step to accelerate innovation inside the organization, but Subject-Matter Experts have to engage in order to get rid of potential mistakes during the implementation of infrastructure automation.
How to implement IT infrastructure automation?
The best way to implement infrastructure automation is to do it gradually. Instead of scheduling a major rollout and causing a massive change throughout the organization, focus on areas that use virtual environments or cloud infrastructures. These areas are quick wins that will instantly show the value of automating infrastructure further. By completing your first successful automation project, you will gain stakeholder's trust and clearly show its business benefits.
Gradual progress in infrastructure automation also allows your employees to understand what the automation does.
Some potential opportunities for early infrastructure automation projects include:
- the initial request for service
- provisioning VMs and IT services
- approving or rejecting requests
- decommissioning resources
- fulfilling requests for resource changes
- self-service for customers
- automating basic environmental maintenance tasks
- activating governance to power the corporate standard identification
If you want to make your company's infrastructure faster and more efficient while also saving money, automation is the way to go. By automating your infrastructure, your development team can easily create, launch, and oversee applications in any environment.
Automation is a cost-effective and sensible answer to managing the complexity of various services that make up your infrastructure. While automation systems required significant resources in the past, today, a team of experts with relevant experience can effortlessly implement automation solutions on top of existing IT solutions.
Processes suited for automation
Resource provisioning
Automation tools give teams the power to create a fully automated infrastructure that can handle any workload with ease. This is done by working in collaboration between Orchestration Software, Virtual Machine's Networking Devices and Data Centers. Automation tools also allow IT organizations' systems to meet business demands automatically!
Configuration management
With the help of automation enterprises can unify operations across different types of machines and environments. Predefined scripts get used thanks to infrastructure as code, this allows to follow best practices across the whole company.
IT migration
The most common challenges during migration are: lack of a clear strategy, cloud sprawl, exceeding budget, weak security and human error. But with the help of automation, it’s easier to move operating systems, applications, and data. All automated processes are faster than manual work.
Deployments
Automated systems perform necessary inspections that ensure software integrity, high levels of functionality and seamless CI/CD. This streamlines workflows while saving man-hours on non-value-adding activities. Saving time is essential in today's world where everything needs constant attention 24/7.
Security & compliance
Thanks to automation and IaC declarations security teams can ensure compliance and create risk management policies. This is accomplished through declarative rules created by the human administrator that are made up of standard patterns.
Implement automation with our help
At Maxima Consulting, we have an excellent track record of implementing infrastructure automation solutions for clients operating across different industries including banking and finance, logistics, and telecommunication. If you are already working on automating your infrastructure, you should learn about the 10 common mistakes made when implementing automation.
We know what it takes to build a good business case for automation and gain approval to make quick wins, cut costs and reduce the complexity of infrastructures. Get in touch with us if you need help in this area; our consultants are ready to assist you at every step of the way.
