Top 10 reasons to use automation

Are you unsure whether Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is right for you? Or are you having problems convincing other people in your organization to give automation a try?

Have no fear! We’re here to help with our top 10 reasons to use Ansible Automation Platform in your organization. And, in the grand tradition of late night talk shows of yore, we’ll count these down from ten.

So, drumroll please...

10. Accomplish processes that can’t be done manually

IT automation tools allow you to do a wide variety of things that simply can’t be done manually. For example, provisioning and deploying environments manually can be time-consuming and requires highly skilled, hands-on knowledge.

But using automation to apply Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approaches to your DevSecOps processes lets your IT team provide self-service capabilities to developers, rapidly and automatically delivering pre-approved resources and configurations on demand without manual intervention.

9. Create team-based solutions that work consistently and rapidly across different technologies

Hybrid and multicloud environments provide an example here in that they add a (deep) layer of complexity to IT team tasks. Every cloud provider has its own tools and management methods, which rarely interoperate directly with each other. This means IT teams have to manage each cloud separately and differently.

IT automation tools can help with this. By creating automation assets that codify resources across all clouds, you can offer a single API for a given operation, regardless of the cloud involved, letting your teams operate more efficiently and effectively.

8. Keep pace with increasing infrastructure scale

Infrastructure needs tend to grow more quickly than the teams who have to create and maintain it, so it’s often a struggle to manage new requirements with existing staffing levels.

IT automation tools will help your existing IT team handle increasing infrastructure requirements by eliminating or streamlining a vast array of tasks, reports and processes. 

7. Integrate and deploy with zero downtime

Fast and reliable application development is increasingly important as organizations delve deeper into their digital transformation strategies. Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) is an approach that can help your organization deliver applications more quickly and with fewer errors.

By adopting a CI/CD pipeline that applies automation throughout your application life cycle—including integration, testing, delivery and deployment—your teams can produce tested and verified applications more quickly and with zero downtime.

6. Control your delivery chain while maintaining compliance

When you have an automated CI/CD pipeline with security gates in place, you can also be assured that your software supply chain produces trusted software components for deployment. Here, automation helps give you full life cycle control of the components in the CI/CD stack, helping you streamline daily operations and integrate security and compliance in your processes from the start.

5. Streamline remediation processes

When security breaches happen, it’s vital to detect and contain those as quickly as possible. Remediation can be complicated and time-consuming when it involves multiple systems and platforms, and applying fixes manually can be error-prone.

Ansible Automation Platform serves as an integration layer between your security teams, tools and processes to streamline security operations. Every second counts during a security breach, and automation helps your security team apply remediation to affected systems across your environment more quickly, with fewer chances for errors.

4. Make more time to focus on high-value initiatives

Most IT tasks can have some level of automation applied to them, including provisioning, configuration management, orchestration, application deployment, and security and compliance.

Automating even a few of these tasks can help reduce the amount of time IT teams have to spend on repetitive, tedious, manual processes, giving them more time to focus on higher value strategic projects. And the more they can automate, the more time they’ll have to work on forward-thinking, innovative projects that can give your organization a competitive advantage.

3. Eliminate errors and risks associated with routine tasks

IT automation is a key element of implementing a successful DevSecOps strategy in that it improves consistency, repeatability and verifiability throughout your operations. By reducing the risk of human error in common daily tasks, automation gives you predictable and repeatable processes for managing configurations to improve consistency, speed changes and increase uptime.

2. Stay ahead of operational complexities and costs

Automation helps you streamline and manage complex environments, while also providing operational analytics that can help you better understand and reduce the costs involved. With an end-to-end integrated platform, you can also reduce complexity by delivering new automation consistently, and by sharing best practices and content across the organization.

1. Transform your organization into a highly agile, instantly scalable, future-proof success story

Organizations that embrace and adopt an “automation-first” culture can save time, save money, and have more time to focus on higher impact strategic initiatives.

When IT automation becomes second nature within your organization, your teams will be able to handle security issues faster, scale up to take advantage of new opportunities more quickly, and experiment more efficiently.

Simply put, an automation-first culture saves time and money while fostering continuous learning, experimentation and innovation.

Learn more

If you would like to learn more about the value of embracing the Ansible Automation Platform in your organization, check out the third episode of “Automated Live!”.

As a bonus, this short video series doubles as a quick and humorous way to explain the basics of automation to people you might be trying to convince to give it a try.

You can find the whole video series here: Automated Live! A video collection hosted by Colin McNaughton.