The automated enterprise
Automation is critical to business success
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 organizations play key roles in helping their business succeed. However, many IT operations teams manage ever-changing, complex IT architectures built on multiple platforms and complicated technology stacks. Due to the maintenance cost and management complexity of their existing systems, these teams may struggle to adopt the new development approaches and technologies needed to support innovation. At the same time, they must operate faster to deliver the resources and services users demand. As a result, IT teams are looking for new ways to streamline operations and manage complex infrastructure at scale.
Automation is the way forward
No matter the complexity of your environment or where you are on your IT modernization journey, an IT automation strategy can help you improve existing processes to better support critical business needs. With automation, you can save time, increase quality, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce costs throughout your organization.
Due to the wide-reaching value that it can deliver, strategic IT automation has shifted from a “nice-to-have” business option to a mission-critical requirement. In fact, 77% of IT professionals across industries consider IT automation to be critical to their business’s success.1 77% also say that their organization is highly or fully dependent on automation today.1 And 9 out of 10 anticipate using more or much more automation in the future.1
Benefits of IT automation
IT automation is essential to:
- Speed operations and development.
- Improve agility and responsiveness.
- Boost productivity and efficiency.
- Increase consistency and availability.
- Improve security and compliance.
- Free staff time to focus on high-value, strategic initiatives and more interesting projects.
What is automation?
Automation is the use of software to perform tasks in order to reduce cost, complexity, and errors. It is prevalent in IT systems and business decision software, and can also be found in other industries like manufacturing, robotics, and vehicle control.
IT automation uses repeatable instructions to replace high-volume manual work. This could be a single task, groups of tasks, or even a complex orchestration of tasks. Its key purpose is to help overburdened staff regain control and shift their focus from tedious day-to-day matters to strategic initiatives and more interesting and rewarding challenges. IT automation can help staff better perform their roles, advance their knowledge and skills, and increase job satisfaction.
What can you automate?
You can automate anything that you can configure or manage yourself.
Automate:
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Accomplish:
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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 delivering
return on IT 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
Do more with event-driven automation
Event-driven automation is the next step in the journey to end-to-end IT automation. It responds automatically when specific events or conditions occur in your IT environment. Event-driven automation receives information from
third-party observability and other tools, decides which actions to take, and initiates predefined actions based
on conditional rules.
By automating responses to events like network or system slowdowns, configuration drift, changing infrastructure conditions, and new service ticket entries, you gain the flexibility to create innovative, complex workflows across your environment. With a more proactive and responsive approach to complex IT challenges, you can achieve greater consistency, accuracy, and resiliency while re-envisioning the IT workday.
Transform your organization through enterprise-wide automation adoption
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.
People
People are at the core of any enterprise-wide initiative, and automation is no different. To adopt automation across your organization, all teams— including line of business, network, security, operations, development, and infrastructure—must be on board and ready to learn new concepts and skills.
Processes
Processes move projects within your organization from start to finish. Clear, documented processes for creating, deploying, managing, and adapting automation and automation content are essential for broad adoption and ongoing use.
Platform
An automation platform provides the capabilities for building, running, and managing your automation. In contrast to simple automation tools, an automation platform gives your organization a unified foundation for creating, deploying, and sharing consistent automation content and knowledge at scale.
Transformation requires automation
Deploying automation across your organization can help you transform to support modern, fast-changing, digital business. No other IT technology can affect all aspects of transformation:
- Maintenance and change management
- Skills and talent
- Standardization and scale
- Continuous delivery
- Operational complexity and costs
Explore Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A beginner’s guide to help your organization solve enterprise IT challenges across hybrid cloud infrastructure.
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.
Tools are effective only for individual and point automation. They do not provide the connection and management capabilities needed for enterprise-wide automation.
Platforms provide a unified foundation for multiple people to automate consistently. They deliver a means for efficiently managing and sharing automation content across an organization.
The value of automation by the numbers
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform unites people and processes on a flexible foundation to deliver value across your organization:
36% higher development team productivity2
68% faster deployment of new compute resources2
23% faster time to market for new products and services2
61% reduction in unplanned downtime2
668% 3-year return on investment (ROI)2
US$8.54 million higher revenue per organization per year2
Create a strategy for adopting automation across your organization
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.
Identify your business objectives
Connect automation efforts with business challenges and goals. This helps you identify where to automate and create top-down requirements for success. For example, you could automate patching to boost system security and stability and meet business needs for higher uptime.
Encourage cross-team collaboration and coordination
Use incentives to promote collaboration across your organization. Coordination allows teams to create complete automation workflows that deliver more value. Working with others also helps to cultivate shared ownership and accountability for automation.
Build trust throughout your organization
Build a centralized repository for trusted automation content. Each team should create automation content in their area of expertise and contribute it to the repository for use by other teams. Staff can include boundaries that allow others to use their content more confidently.
Share knowledge and success
Create a core team of stakeholders—often called a community of practice (CoP) or center of excellence (CoE)—that share automation best practices, experiences, and accomplishments across your organization. These teams should also help others along their automation journey.
Centralize your automation content
Choose an automation platform that provides a unified foundation for collaboration, tools, and content across your organization. Sharing tools and content in a single, trusted location allows teams to automate more efficiently and avoid duplicate efforts.
Defining automation success
There is no single way to measure automation success—each team has unique characteristics and ambitions. Create realistic goals that align with your organization’s current skills while encouraging teams to learn and expand their abilities. Examples of long-term automation success include:
- Adoption across your enterprise, from vision to execution, with an emphasis on simplicity and shared knowledge.
- Accountability with each staff member taking responsibility for their individual goals.
- Governance through prescriptive processes that accomplish automation goals and produce repeatable results.
- Security with a simplified pipeline, repeatable and reusable practices, proactive vulnerability resolution, and automated investigation and response to incidents.
- Standards that provide the foundation and extensibility needed to achieve organizational and team goals.
Start your journey to automation success
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.
- Understand your inventory
How are your IT assets organized and managed? Identify which assets you have, how they are configured, and how you will keep track of them over time. - Define a source control repository
How will you track changes to your automation content? Create consistent, security-focused methods for recording and controlling changes to your assets. - Train your staff
Does your staff have the skills they need to automate successfully? Train your staff on concepts like source control, testing protocols, and best practices. - Make use of platform features to speed adoption
Does your automation platform include tools to help your teams start automating in less time? Be sure to make use of features and capabilities that help teams adopt automation with less effort. For example, generative artificial intelligence (AI) code creation capabilities can help teams write and maintain automation content more efficiently.
Explore common automation use cases
Automation adoption is a journey, so you can start with a single use case and expand at a pace that works for your organization.
This chapter gives an overview of common automation use cases to help you explore the benefits of automation within your organization.
How to define automation success
There is no single way to measure automation success — each team has unique characteristics and ambitions. Create realistic goals that align with your organization’s current skills while encouraging teams to learn and expand their abilities. Examples of long-term automation success include:
- Adoption across your enterprise, from vision to execution, with an emphasis on simplicity and shared knowledge.
- Accountability with each staff member taking responsibility for their individual goals.
- Governance through prescriptive processes that accomplish goals and produce repeatable results.
- Security with a simplified pipeline, repeatable and reusable practices, proactive vulnerability resolution, and automated investigation and response to incidents.
- Standards that provide a foundation and provide the extensibility needed to achieve organizational and team goals.
Where can you start automating?
Common places to start your automation journey include:
- Read-only tasks.
- Inventory creation.
- Tedious manual tasks.
- Frequently requested tasks.
Enterprise-grade automation platforms often include features to help you get started faster. Look for platforms that include features like generative AI code creation and certified predefined automation content to streamline adoption across your organization.
Infrastructure automation
Most IT organizations face growing infrastructure size and complexity. Teams manage 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, so you can gain visibility into and control over your infrastructure.
Manage IT infrastructure configurations
IT environments contain a variety of hardware and software. Consistently managing all of these manually 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.
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.
Tambla Workforce Solutions migrated aging IT systems to Red Hat’s enterprise platform, automation, and management solutions.
Reduced monthly cost of delivering payroll services by
AU$30,000 Read the success story.
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. Look for platforms that integrate with your ITSM tools like ServiceNow to make the most of event-driven automation.
Network automation
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.
Cepsa automated their deployment of SAP S/4HANA®, then transformed their entire business culture with expert automation guidance and best practices.
>6,000 work hours saved through automation Read the success story.
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.
Swisscom automated management of around 20,000 network and IT components to shift focus to more valuable development projects and accelerate response times for resource requests.
3,000 hours per year in manual operating system tasks saved (approximate) 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.
Surescripts automated IT processes and failover operations to speed network appliance and server deployment, issue resolution, and launch new applications to customers.
2 hours per service saved during failover incidents.
Security automation
As 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 and integrate security into processes, applications, and infrastructure from the start. In fact, extensive use of security automation and AI can reduce the average cost of a breach by 39.3%, but only 28% of organizations have done so.3
Accelerate 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 shut down resources as needed, gather log files from affected systems, and update vulnerability reports to provide timely, complete, and accurate information for incident investigation and response.
BYMA (Bolsas y Mercados Argentinos) implemented Red Hat technology solutions to speed operating system configuration and security, patching, and certificate changes.
Applied password protection tools for
>600 users Read the success story.
Speed security incident response
Detecting and containing security breaches within 200 days or fewer can reduce the average cost of a breach by US$1.02 million.3 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 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.
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.
>10 integrations to enhance security and protect automation environments Read the success story.
DevOps automation
DevOps brings development and operations teams together to move ideas and projects from development to production in less time 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 workflows to support rapid, agile application and service development and launch. And automation platforms that include generative AI code creation capabilities can help your teams write, adopt, and maintain automation content even more efficiently. Generative AI models trained on large automation-specific data sets can help teams become more productive with trusted, accurate automation code suggestions.
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.
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 need 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, resulting in slower development.
How can automation help?
Combining application programming interface (API)-centric design with automation reduces the time it takes your IT team to deliver resources, 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 continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to further speed application development and deployment workflows.
Crédit Agricole Group Infrastructure Platform (CA-GIP) replaced its community automation solution with Ansible Automation Platform.
Automated operations for
20,000 Linux® servers in the equivalent of 1 employee’s work hours Read the success story.
Hybrid and multicloud automation
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.
Red Hat is a strategic partner enabling us to be agile and dynamic to thrive in a multi-cloud future.[4]
Read the press release.
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.
AIA Group migrated 90% of its workloads to the cloud using 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.
Automation at the edge
Edge solutions will drive 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.5 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. 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:
Increase scalability.
Apply configurations consistently across your infrastructure and scale edge devices more quickly.
Boost agility.
Adapt to changing customer demands using edge resources only as needed.
Focus on security and safety.
Run updates, patches, and required maintenance automatically without sending a technician to the site.
Reduce downtime.
Simplify network management, reduce network failure, and boost your bottom line.
Improve efficiency.
Increase performance and reduce human error with automated analysis, monitoring, and alerting.
Respond faster.
Deliver optimized user experiences with automated workflows based on real-time data and events.
Discover more about how automation at the edge can help different industries
Ensure success with Red Hat Consulting
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
- Discover your quick-win opportunities
Define a strategy to identify organizational objectives and address process, tool, and skills gaps with measurable outcomes. Select a single process or area to start with. - 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. - Integrate your initial success
Based on your initial experience, integrate standardized workflows with other operational or business support systems for increased oversight, orchestration, or benefits. - 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. - 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.
If we were going to invest in a new approach, we needed to ensure our teams were given the right knowledge and skills to support it. Red Hat Consulting was a great partner in our learning.[6]
5 steps to automate your business
A platform for the entire automation team
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 Ansible Automation Platform. It will help your organization operate more efficiently, reduce costs, and free up more time for innovation.
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.
- Automation developers retain the freedom to build, without the operational overhead of maintaining many tools and frameworks. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant and other development tools and features help teams create, test, and deploy automation content accurately and in less time.
- Administrators and operators can manage and share automation projects more efficiently using powerful tools in 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, including network and security automation, cloud infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, CI/CD, containers, and beyond.
Move your business forward with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
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.
No matter where you are in your automation journey, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help you increase agility, improve productivity, and get to market faster.
Everything you need to deploy enterprise-wide automation
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.
Cloud native
A containerized architecture and ecosystem integrations that support hybrid cloud deployments by offering consistent, reliable performance and true interoperability across vendors, clouds, and environments
Trusted
A more reliable, enterprise-wide solution fully supported by Red Hat that gives IT teams more time to focus on business needs with innovation and agility
Holistic
An efficient, comprehensive platform for true end-to-end automation that helps organizations accelerate business outcomes and ROI
Intelligent
Real-time, actionable visibility into the security and overall health of an organization's network with proactive monitoring, optimization, and compliance through Red Hat Insights and automation analytics
Scalable
A foundation to build and operate automation at scale, with visibility, control, and adaptability
Event-driven
Capabilities to respond to observed events in a predetermined way to support a proactive approach to Day 2 operational management.
Ansible Automation Platform brings together people, processes, and a platform to help you deploy enterprise-wide automation.
Expand your automation workflows
Ansible Content Collections offer more than 140 prebuilt modules, roles, and more from industry-leading partners. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections help jump-start integration with these partner platforms and Ansible validated content provides an opinionated path for performing operational tasks.
Key partner integrations include:
• CyberArk
• IBM
• SAP
See success in action
Advance innovation
Learn how automation helps organizations adapt to change and advance innovation across industries.
Read the Innovate with automation e-book to discover how 4 organizations moved their business forward.
Enhance security
Learn how automation helps organizations protect their data, applications, IT systems, networks, and devices from malicious threats.
Read the Enhance security with automation e-book to learn how 5 organizations improved security.
Simplify IT infrastructure
Learn how infrastructure automation helps teams create repeatable processes that can save time and money.
Read the Simplify IT infrastructure with automation e-book to discover how 6 organizations streamlined IT operations.
A more productive business is a more competitive business. We have been able to dedicate the equivalent of 18 months of 1 employee’s work to more rewarding, strategic projects within the IT department.[7]
We only do a few things, but we do them very well. That’s the benefit of maximizing automation in what we do.[8]
Ready to start your automation journey?
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
Red Hat primary research: Ansible mission critical study conducted by The Paragraph Project.
IDC White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat. “The business value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.” Document #US51839824. March 2024.
IBM Security. “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023,” 2023.
Red Hat press release. “etisalat by e& Standardizes on Red Hat for Greater Innovation, Consistency and Scalability Across Hybrid Cloud,” 19 October 2023.
IDC Spotlight, sponsored by Red Hat. “Edge Growth Drives Need for Automating the Last Mile,” Doc #US50598823. April 2023.
Red Hat case study. “Crédit Agricole Group Infrastructure Platform (CA-GIP) scales automation with Red Hat,” May 2022.
Red Hat case study. “Cepsa boosts efficiency with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform,” May 2022.
Red Hat case study. “Sapphire Health accelerates innovation with Red Hat,” July 2021.