The automated enterprise

Change is upon us

The pace and scale of modern business innovation is increasing. Many industries are experiencing widespread disruption. Digitally connected customers demand more at a faster pace. New competition comes from outside of traditional market segments. These trends place competitive pressures on businesses.

IT complexity can inhibit innovation

IT modernization is all about finding smarter ways to do business. However, IT operations teams manage ever-changing, complex IT architectures built on multiple platforms and complicated technology stacks. Many organizations struggle to deploy a modern infrastructure due to the maintenance cost and management complexity of their existing systems. Combined with the need to innovate at a faster pace, this complexity places a burden on IT operations teams. They are now asked to move more rapidly, manage increasingly complex IT environments, and accommodate new development approaches and technologies.

Automation can help

No matter the complexity of your environment or where you are on your IT modernization journey, an IT operations automation strategy can help you improve existing processes. With automation, you can save time, increase quality, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce costs throughout your organization.

Automation is for everyone

Automation can help you mitigate key issues across roles.

• CIOs need to reduce costs and risks across infrastructure, network, and engineering organizations.
• IT operations leaders need to ensure IT efficiency and resilience while reducing risk and maintaining return on investments.
• IT architects need team-based solutions that work consistently and rapidly across technologies.
• Engineering directors need to control all aspects of the delivery chain while maintaining compliance.
• DevOps practitioners need a zero-downtime continuous integration and deployment platform.
• Systems administrators need tools that help them keep pace with increasing infrastructure scale.
• Security analysts need efficient ways to evaluate events and streamline remediation processes.

How can automation help?

Automation serves as a force multiplier for your teams, making work less complicated and more repeatable. You can address a variety of common IT challenges with automation:

• Errors, risks, and high costs associated with routine tasks and manual processes
• Difficulty performing operations at scale
• Slow time to value for applications and services
• Inefficient workflows and operations
• Trouble keeping pace with increasing changes, demand, and infrastructure size
• Lack of time to focus on high-value initiatives
• Disconnects between teams using multistep processes to solve common issues

Many organizations already automate IT operations in discrete areas using inflexible ad hoc scripts, proprietary and device-specific legacy tools, or an array of single-function and vendor-specific management tools. While these approaches may speed specific tasks, they do not scale across diverse, multivendor environments or cross-domain processes and can make it difficult to share automation expertise throughout your organization. Additionally, it is often difficult to update and extend these types of automation as technologies evolve and new requirements emerge. 

An enterprise-wide approach can help you realize the full value of automation for modern, digital operations. Enterprise-wide automation allows your organization to manage complex environments more readily, gain visibility into your operations, rapidly respond to changing conditions in your IT environment, and integrate new technology and processes more effectively. This supports increased business agility, resilience, innovation, and value.

Enterprise-wide automation involves your people, processes, and platform

Automating across your organization requires more than just tools — you also need to consider your people, processes, and platform.

Enterprise-wise automation relies on a combination of people, processes, and a platform. Each factor has a significant effect on your automation outcomes. Successful automation requires you to address each element.

Automation platform versus automation tool

Though they may seem like the same thing, automation platforms and tools have contrasting characteristics that can be the difference between efficient enterprise-wide adoption and unorganized, disparate automation efforts.

Enterprise-wide automation does not happen instantly, and automation is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You need a sustainable automation strategy to guide your journey. Building your strategy requires assessment, planning, and adaptation.

Once you have your automation strategy defined, it’s time to get started. Start small, show value, expand conservatively, and repeat. Work to accomplish incremental successes over short periods of time. For each win, promote the value of automation and share your experience across your organization. This establishes a base for others to build upon your experiences and deliver even more value.

Identify and celebrate success

Successful automation delivers measurable business value by moving your organization from operational efficiency to organizational effectiveness. Save time and free staff to focus on strategic work. Increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Improve the quality of infrastructure, applications, and products. Reduce costs and overcome complexity.

The specifics of automation success will look different for each organization, but there are common themes:

• Multiple teams within your organization create and share automation content in a consistent, standardized manner.
• Teams can manage their resources more effectively and focus on key priorities with their existing staffing level.
• Expertise across your organization is codified in your automation library.
• Responses to common events and changing conditions can be handled automatically without manual intervention via advanced techniques like event-driven automation.

Prerequisites for starting your automation journey

Before you begin automating, prepare your organization for success with the following steps.

Most IT organizations face growing infrastructure size and complexity. Teams are managing a mix of operating systems, databases, storage, IT service management (ITSM) platforms, and more. With limited time and staff, IT teams often struggle to keep pace with this growth, resulting in delayed updates, patching, and resource delivery. Applying automation to common management tasks — like provisioning, configuring, deploying, and decommissioning — simplifies operations at scale, allowing you to regain control over and visibility into your infrastructure.

Manage IT infrastructure configurations

Your IT environment contains a variety of hardware and software. Consistently managing all of these by hand can lead to lost productivity, higher maintenance costs, and the inability to meet strict service-level agreements (SLAs).

How can automation help?

Automation gives you predictable and repeatable processes for managing configurations and performing tasks across systems to improve consistency, speed changes, and increase uptime.

Do more with event-driven automation

Using infrastructure performance data, event-driven automation can constantly adjust allocated resources and scale storage and processing to meet user and application demand.

Automation in action

The British Army Information Application Services (IAS) Branch used automation to simplify infrastructure management, deploy changes faster and more efficiently, and reduce manual errors and unplanned downtime.

• 75% less time to deliver infrastructure changes

Read the success story.

Maintain more systems with your existing staff

IT teams do not usually grow in size at the same pace as the infrastructure they manage. Teams often struggle to maintain increasing responsibilities with their existing staffing levels.

How can automation help?

Automation helps teams manage large, complex IT infrastructures with their current staff. It can free your staff from tedious, time-consuming tasks and allow them to focus on more rewarding and strategic projects. 

Do more with event-driven automation

Event-driven automation can respond instantly — and in compliance with policies — to events like new service ticket entries, user administration requests, identified security threats, resources reaching capacity thresholds, and high network latency. It can also proactively automate tasks like creating backups, gathering facts, and provisioning and scaling resources to free staff time.

Automation in action

Cepsa automated their deployment of SAP S/4HANA®, then transformed their entire business culture with expert automation guidance and best practices.

• More than 6000 work hours saved through automation

Read the success story.

Even as underlying technologies have evolved, network management has remained largely the same. Networks are typically built, operated, and maintained by hand. However, traditional, manual approaches to network configuration and updates are too slow and error-prone to effectively support the needs of rapidly shifting workload requirements. Automating network resource and service management allows network operations teams to become more agile and flexible and effectively support modern business demands.

Ensure network configuration consistency

Manual network configuration can result in inconsistencies, misconfigurations, and network instabilities, making it difficult to deliver the high level of service needed for digital business operations.

How can automation help?

Automation helps you standardize network management processes to enforce best practices. Network operations teams can promptly and efficiently deliver services at scale and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) for service interruptions.

Do more with event-driven automation

Event-driven automation can combat configuration drift by aligning network resources to the latest released configurations and policies. By proactively fixing potential issues, you can prevent many of the outages that result in after-hours calls.

Automation in action

Swisscom automated management of around 15,000 network and IT components to shift focus to more valuable development projects and accelerate response times for resource requests.

• 3,000 hours saved on manual tasks (anticipated)

Read the success story

Streamline application load balancing and failover

Application loads must be balanced across infrastructure to optimize performance and costs. Manually balancing loads can lead to poor application performance and delay failover when system problems arise.

How can automation help?

Automating your load balancers eliminates the need for manual intervention, permitting faster ongoing adjustments and failover for improved application performance and reliability.

Do more with event-driven automation

By observing metrics like bandwidth, throughput, latency, and packet loss, event-driven automation can optimize network and workload resource performance to help applications deliver the best possible user experience. You can also ensure that revenue-generating applications are aligned with needs and demand.

Automation in action

Surescripts automated IT processes and failover operations to speed network appliance and server deployment, issue resolution, and launch of new applications to customers.

• 2 hours per service saved during failover incidents

Read the success story

As both infrastructure and networks grow in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually manage security and compliance. Manual operations can result in slower detection and remediation of issues, errors in resource configuration, and inconsistent policy application, leaving your systems vulnerable to compliance issues and attack. Automation can help you streamline daily operations as well as integrate security into processes, applications, and infrastructure from the start. In fact, fully deploying security automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce the average cost of a breach by 65.2%, but only 31% of organizations have done so.²

Threat hunting

45% of security professionals use more than 20 tools when investigating and responding to a cybersecurity incident.³ This can be a big problem for the identification of cybersecurity threats. Manual processes can delay threat identification in complex IT environments, leaving your business vulnerable. 

How can automation help?

Applying automation to your security processes can help you identify, validate, and escalate threats faster without manual intervention.

Do more with event-driven automation

When a threat is identified, event-driven automation can quickly shut down affected resources as needed, gather log files from impacted systems, and update vulnerability reports to provide timely, complete, and accurate information for incident investigation and response.

Automation in action

The security team at Emory University was notified of a security vulnerability that needed to be remediated right away. They used the Ansible Automation Platform to remediate a patch across 500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux® servers.

• 4 hours to patch 500 servers for a security vulnerability

Read the success story.

Security incident response

Detecting and containing security breaches within 200 days or less can reduce the average cost of a breach by US$1.12 million.² However, remediation across multiple platforms and tools can be complicated, time-consuming, and error-prone when performed manually.

How can automation help?

Security teams can use automation to connect tools and rapidly apply remediation to affected systems across your environment concurrently and respond to incidents faster.

Do more with event-driven automation

By monitoring vulnerability reports, event-driven automation can proactively isolate and remediate infrastructure and applications to protect against malicious threats and loss of confidential business information.

Automation in action

As an established leader in privileged access management and identity security capabilities, CyberArk partnered to build Red Hat certified integrations, which offer end-to-end security for Red Hat OpenShift® and Ansible Automation Platform. 

• More than 10 integrations to enhance security and protect automation environments

Read the success story.

DevOps brings development and operations teams together to move ideas and projects from development to production faster and more efficiently. This involves more frequent changes to code and more dynamic infrastructure use. Traditional, manual management strategies cannot keep up with this increased demand. Automation helps you accelerate your processes, continuously scale environments, and build continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows to support fast, agile application and service development and launch.

Provision environments

DevOps environments encompass a variety of technologies. Provisioning and deploying changes to these complex environments can be time-consuming and requires expert knowledge for each component.

How can automation help?

Applying Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approaches with automation allows your IT team to provide self-service capabilities and rapidly deliver preapproved resources and configurations without manual intervention.

Do more with event-driven automation

When a member of your team encounters an issue, event-driven automation can take immediate action—like adding configuration information to service tickets or parsing log files for critical messages—to simplify and speed the troubleshooting process and keep development and deployment activities on track.

Automation in action

The City and County of Denver, Colorado, automated provisioning, application deployment, and configuration management for its Microsoft Teams deployment to support more than 15,000 employees working from home.

• 514% increase in Microsoft Teams use supported

Read the success story.

Accelerate development

Developers require IT resources to create, test, and deploy new applications and services. Manual IT operations can delay resource and service delivery and impede proof-of-concept performance, ultimately resulting in slower development.

How can automation help?

Combining application programming interface (API)-centric design with automation lets your IT team deliver resources faster, supporting rapid proofs of concept, development, testing, and deployment into production.

Do more with event-driven automation

Event-driven automation lets you incorporate more tasks like automatic, self-service resource provisioning and workload deployment in your CI/CD pipeline to further speed application development and deployment workflows.

Automation in action

Elo Serviços S.A. automated its IT environment to deploy, manage, and update its customer service and applications faster and stay ahead of traditional and fintech competition.

• More than 97% faster service time to market

Read the success story.

Hybrid and multicloud environments add an additional layer of complexity to infrastructure, network, application, and user administration. IT teams need to manage both on-site and cloud-based environments, often using specialized management tools for each. As a result, it can be nearly impossible to effectively maintain, track, scale, and safely manage resources and applications by hand. Automation can unite hybrid and multicloud management under a single set of processes and policies to improve consistency, scalability, and speed.

Scale multicloud environments

Each cloud provider offers specific tools for operating and managing their own cloud resources. These tools rarely interoperate directly with each other, requiring IT teams to provision, administer, and maintain each cloud differently.

How can automation help?

Automation can help you manage multicloud environments more consistently. You can create automation assets that codify resources across all of your clouds and offer a single API for a given operation, regardless of the cloud involved.

Do more with event-driven automation

Event-driven automation can observe and analyze hybrid and multicloud resource use to help manage public cloud spending and ensure that cloud resource consumption complies with corporate policies.

Automation in action

Datacom transformed its service offerings with automation, streamlining internal operations and providing its customers a flexible, swift, and efficient platform that can adapt over time.

• 20% higher operational efficiency

Read the success story.

Integrate private cloud environments

Hybrid cloud environments combine both on-site and cloud platforms, resources, and tools. This variety can make it difficult for IT teams to integrate and support both infrastructures consistently.

How can automation help?

A flexible automation platform lets you apply the same automation code to existing on-site systems, current cloud resources, and future assets, ensuring consistency and providing a layer of operational integration.

Do more with event-driven automation

Event-driven automation can manage cloud-native workloads from deployment to retirement and help optimize resource use across hybrid cloud environments.

Automation in action

AIA Group migrated 90% of its workloads to the cloud using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to eliminate manual processes while improving security and compliance.

• 18 months to migrate 50% of IT infrastructure to the cloud

Read the success story.

Edge solutions will prompt the next wave of innovation as organizations execute digital transformation initiatives. Whether to automate operations, deliver rich customer experiences, or introduce new business models, edge solutions hold many benefits for enterprises.⁴ Organizations are doing more at the edge of the network, closer to where data is generated, services are used, and end-users interact with systems and devices.

Automation at the edge helps organizations respond to business needs by automating processes to discover, decide, and take action. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses containerization to distribute and run automation across environments. This design makes running automation in environments with limited resources possible—letting you automate better at the edge.

Automation at the edge can help your organization:

Red Hat Consulting can help you automate your enterprise more efficiently and in less time. Our experts will provide you with a framework for managing an organization-wide automation adoption journey. Red Hat Consulting works with you on all stages of automation adoption, from introducing techniques and technology, to aligning teams on standard practices, to orchestrating powerful workflows aligned to your evolving business objectives.

Steps for automation success

1. Discover your quick-win opportunities
   Define an overarching strategy to identify organizational objectives and address process, tooling, and skill gaps with measurable outcomes. Select a single process or area to automate and showcase.
2. Build a pilot that gets noticed
   Automate and deploy into production an initial set of workflows, managed by a select team using Ansible Automation Platform. Use your pilot to demonstrate meaningful impact for your business and IT.
3. Integrate your initial success
   Based on your experience with your pilot, integrate a set of standardized workflows with additional operational or business support systems for increased oversight, orchestration, or other benefits.
4. Accelerate your automation adoption
   Create a center of excellence (CoE) or community of practice (CoP), based on your adoption core team, to guide other teams in applying standardized automation approaches across projects and processes.
5. Optimize and move toward an automation-first culture
   Continually evaluate your automation practices and rapidly launch, combine, and enhance workflows and orchestrations to meet changing requirements as your organization introduces new technologies and solutions.

Automating at scale requires a top-down strategy that includes investments in time, technology, and people. Make the most of that investment—and stay ahead of the competition—with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. It will help your organization operate more efficiently, reduce costs, and free up create more time for innovation.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations adopt a culture of collaborative automation by delivering a consistent experience everywhere, based on features tailored to the needs of the entire IT team.

With Ansible Automation Platform:

• IT managers and architects can more readily expand automation across their enterprise, while managing policies and governance with the automation services catalog. They can also plan, measure, and track automation performance with automation analytics and Red Hat Insights.
• Developers retain the freedom to build, without the operational overhead of maintaining many tools and frameworks. Execution environments deliver a consistent container-like experience for building, managing, and scaling automation.
• Administrators and operators can manage and share automation projects more efficiently using powerful tools in the automation controller and automation hub, including a common language and broadly accessible mix of command line interfaces (CLIs), graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and text-based user interfaces (TUI) across endpoints.
• Your organization can tackle automation challenges from network and security automation, to cloud infrastructure provisioning, to configuration management, to CI/CD, containers, and beyond.

A foundation for building and operating automation services at scale, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers all the tools and features you need to implement enterprise-wide automation. It is engineered to help you create, manage, and scale your automation workloads. It offers a flexible, stable, and security-focused foundation for deploying end-to-end automation solutions—from IT processes, to hybrid cloud, to edge locations. 

• Create
  Get started in less time by accessing Ansible’s massive open source community and prebuilt Ansible roles, plugins, and modules. Codify your infrastructure and share automation assets across teams and individuals to deploy and manage infrastructure on-site or in a cloud environment.
• Manage
  Standardize how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited. With the new automation controller (formerly Ansible Tower), users from multiple teams can reliably and consistently scale automation on demand, taking a systematic approach to standardizing automation practices—while helping to reduce automation irregularities across your enterprise.
• Scale
  Transfer your automation to multiple domains and across different use cases. Stakeholders in developer, operator, and line-of-business teams can engage with automation in ways that work best for them and make sense for their individual roles without slowing development time.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform makes it possible for users across an organization to share, vet, and manage automation content by means of a simple, powerful, and agentless technical implementation. IT managers can provide guidelines on how automation is applied to individual teams. Meanwhile, automation creators retain the freedom to write tasks that use existing knowledge, without the operational overhead of conforming to complex tools and frameworks. It is a more reliable and stable foundation for deploying end-to-end automation solutions, from a hybrid cloud to the edge of your infrastructure.

Ansible Automation Platform brings together people, processes, and a platform to help you deploy enterprise-wide automation. People

Learn more at Ansible.com

 Improve efficiencies, cost savings with Red Hat automation and container technologies

Challenge

To achieve its vision of making healthcare simpler and more affordable for customers, health insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina needed to change its delivery model. In order to shift to a more responsive IT environment, Blue Cross NC sought a platform-agnostic solution with automation capabilities in a public cloud application that also could help improve visibility and reduce costs. The health insurer was using a costly third-party managed services provider that often took weeks to provision a single virtual machine. Additionally, employees were handling various repetitive tasks instead of working on more dynamic, innovative projects.

Solution

Through an engagement with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, Blue Cross NC built its in-house IT environment on Red Hat OpenShift running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With help from a Red Hat Technical Account Manager, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Training, the organization replaced its managed service provider with in-house IT talent, migrated 100+ services and 250+ applications to a container-based platform, and deployed 200,000+ human-readable Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Playbooks in just two years.

• Created in-house IT team to replace costly externally managed service
• Saved 70,000 work hours by automating virtual machine provisioning
• Established organization-wide focus on agility 

Accelerate cloud migration with automated IT provisioning 

Challenge

With a presence in 18 markets across the Asia Pacific region, AIA Group needed to modernize its approach by migrating 90% of its business workloads to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud was fundamental to scaling the business in the face of new demands, including the COVID-19 pandemic. AIA decided that the cloud should underpin the organization’s goal of creating compelling propositions, providing faster distribution, and improving customer experiences.

Solution

With a focus to adhere to prevailing information security, architecture, design, and operations standards across its group activities, AIA decided to standardize on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. The agentless technology was ideal for handling complex deployments and repetitive tasks. Easy-to-understand Ansible Playbooks allow teams across the organization to share, evaluate, and manage automation content. Working closely with Red Hat Consulting, AIA implemented the platform, which included setting up integration with its ServiceNow request tool and building several self-service catalogs.

Although the implementation was complex, support from Red Hat, ServiceNow, and AIA’s security vendor helped ensure everything was successfully integrated across the organization in just two months.

• Reduced service provisioning time from 90 days to 1 hour
• Improved development security and compliance while sourcing new ideas
• Migrated 50% of IT infrastructure to the cloud in just 18 months

Improve operational efficiency with automation 

Challenge

Cepsa is a leading international company, with operations on five continents, committed to sustainable mobility and energy with strong technical expertise after more than 90 years of activity. It also has a global chemicals business with world-leading positions and a progressive green plan. They needed to increase efficiency and stay compliant while reducing costs, risk, and downtime.

Solution

To achieve this goal, Cepsa began automating processes to save work hours, improve service response times, enhance IT security, and transform organizational culture. Working in close collaboration with Red Hat Consulting, the company established automation as a core pillar of its innovation strategy, led by an automation manager. As a result, Cepsa increased productivity by 35% and increased response times by 10–15%.

• Saved more than 6,000 work hours with central automation approach
• Enhanced service levels with 10–15% faster IT response times
• Transformed business culture with expert automation guidance

Digital business requires automation. An enterprise-wide automation approach can help you save time, increase quality, and reduce costs.

Red Hat provides an automation platform and expertise that empower your organization to boost business agility, innovation, and value.

Get started with Ansible: ansible.com/get-started

Learn more about IT automation: redhat.com/it-automation