Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

In the current digital landscape where organisations need to handle a rapidly rising amount of processes and moving pieces in their IT, it is becoming imperative for them to rely on automation. After all, IT now plays a central role in enabling the success of a business and hence, IT teams must be capable of managing increasingly large, complex and disparate IT environments faster and more effectively.

In fact, 52% of organisations are expecting IT to increase efficiencies through automation, according to a report by Red Hat. Businesses are turning to automation to overcome infrastructure management challenges, with 86% saying that too many manual processes pose a problem in managing IT spending.

Not automating the IT infrastructure workflows will likely cause drawbacks in the long-term. Most traditional organisations use a domain-centric approach to IT infrastructure management, where each team manages its own area of expertise using its preferred tools and methods.

However, operating in this disjointed manner does not facilitate inter-domain integration and may be counterproductive as it gives rise to issues such as:

• Inefficient production and processing of assets.
• Lack of collaboration between people and processes.
• Longer time to market.
• Time-consuming projects.
• Higher costs in the long run.

While automation is becoming a big factor in IT optimisation and digital transformation, companies tend to automate their infrastructure independently by domain. As with overall infrastructure management, each team uses its chosen automation tools and processes, prompting higher costs, lower efficiency and limited collaboration.

This is why a unified approach in automation workflows is necessary, to save time, increase quality, improve employee satisfaction and reduce costs throughout the entire infrastructure and organisation. A holistic approach to infrastructure automation can help your organisation:

• Speed of operations and development.
• Improve agility and responsiveness.
• Boost productivity and efficiency.
• Increase reliability and availability.
• Improve security and compliance.

Organisations need automation, especially for their infrastructure workflows where they need to connect multiple tasks into a single progression. But, what aspects of your IT infrastructure workflow can you automate?

1. Hardware and servers: Once servers are installed in your data centre, most administration operations are carried out using a management interface. Automation platforms can interact with these tools to speed up operations and reduce setup errors.
2. Virtualised resources: Automation can help you manage your virtualised environments more effectively to optimise costs and control sprawl. You can even automate the virtualisation hypervisor itself to simplify updates.
3. Cloud services: Cloud environments are designed for automation. Most cloud components and services need to be completely automated to maximise their value.
4. Operating system: Automation can help you define and manage a standardised operating environment to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase uptime and boost security.
5. Networking: Automation can help network teams confidently make predefined, pretested changes on demand. It can also help teams accomplish more within each change window.
6. Storage: Automation can help storage teams reduce manual work to speed up operations. Predefined storage requests can be automatically provisioned and storage resources can be scaled dynamically to meet changing needs.
7. Applications: Automation can help you consistently deploy applications across development, test and production environments as well as physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures according to corporate, regulatory, performance and cost requirements.

A unified automation platform is central to effective workflow automation and this is what Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers. It is a single framework that helps you automate all aspects of your infrastructure, from servers and network devices to operating systems, application and security.

Multiple domain teams can use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, allowing you to create, scale and deploy your automation across your entire IT organisation. With the automation capabilities provided by Red Hat Ansible, your organisation can now keep up with the increasing demands on your infrastructure workflows and realise digital transformation.

In order to effectively manage IT infrastructure in today’s data-driven environment, businesses have to be able to automate both individual tasks and entire workflows. Red Hat offers a unified automation platform that connects your IT infrastructure, processes and teams to deliver more business value. To learn more, click here.

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