What is automation?
Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. Any industry that encounters repetitive tasks can use automation, but automation is more prevalent in the industries of manufacturing, robotics, and automotives, as well as in IT systems.
IT automation
The use of technology to automate repetitive, manual IT tasks such as provisioning, network management, and data backup and recovery.
Cloud automation
The use of technology that performs tasks with reduced human assistance to unite cloud management processes, including cloud operations, orchestration, and governance.
Business automation
The alignment of business process management (BPM), business process automation (BPA), business rules management (BRM), and business optimization with modern application development to respond to market changes.
Business process automation
The use of software to automate repeatable, multistep business transactions.
Robotic process automation
The use of software robots to perform repetitive tasks previously done by humans.
Industrial automation
The reduction of human labor in manufacturing processes as part of factory automation efforts, usually to the point where human workers simply provide oversight at a control panel or other human-machine interface (HMI).
Artificial intelligence
Rule-based software that performs tasks typically accomplished with human intervention.
Machine learning
Adaptive algorithms that use predictive models to perform tasks without explicit instructions—automatically modifying algorithms with each completed task
Deep learning
Multiple adaptive algorithms, automation software, and programs that perform a fixed repetitive task—such as extracting small details from raw images.
Why automate?
In today’s world of rapid technological change, the challenges organizations face—to support employees and partners, reach new customers, and provide innovative products and services—are more complex than ever before. IT plays a crucial role in meeting these demands, but also acts as a blocker if it isn’t scalable and can’t keep up with demand.
As enterprises scale, so does the difficulty of deploying and maintaining environments that are stable, more secure, and consistent. To break it down further:
- IT operations are resource-intensive—and maintaining legacy systems and processes at the same time as new ones only increases complexity.
- Requirements and demand are outgrowing IT and business capabilities.
- The scale of technology (virtualization, cloud, containers, etc.) is too great to do manually.
In this constantly shifting environment, automation has become a strategic imperative. Automation is critical to managing, changing, and adapting your IT infrastructure and the way your enterprise operates. IT teams can automate complex processes to increase efficiency, productivity, and flexibility—while also reducing costs and human error.
Advantages of IT automation
Automation is not meant to replace people—its purpose is to augment human capabilities. This is known as the paradox of automation: as you become efficient using automation, human involvement becomes more important but less frequent.
Some may see automation as a tool that eliminates jobs, but automation actually frees up existing IT staff to focus on larger challenges. By simplifying processes and reducing manual tasks, IT teams can improve efficiency and productivity—while also preserving resources to work toward strategic goals, such as improving customer satisfaction.
Automation can help enterprises achieve:
- Greater productivity. By automating mundane, repetitive tasks, a higher volume of tasks can be performed more quickly with less oversight, allowing IT staff to spend more time on value-adding projects.
- Better reliability. Decreasing the amount of human intervention also reduces the risk for errors and improves consistency. Automation ensures that steps are done the same way every time—so teams know exactly when processes, tests, updates, or workflows are going to happen, how long they’ll take, and whether they complete correctly.
- Easier governance. Relying on large teams of people to perform complex processes can easily lead to knowledge gaps and miscommunication, both within and between groups in an organization. Codifying knowledge in automation can help to ensure more controlled, consistent governance across teams and tasks.
- 24/7 operations. Since automation can execute tasks in the middle of the night without human intervention, businesses can automate remediation at any time, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimizing downtime.
- Better security. Automation can be used to identify, prevent, and respond more quickly—in a standardized way—to potential security threats across IT environments.
Developing a unified strategy
Many organizations start their automation journey by automating a few small tasks. This approach lets businesses get familiar with the technology, and it’s great for accelerating some operations in the short-term. But you can’t realize the full, long-term benefits of automation if individual teams or practitioners are automating in isolation.
To scale automation across multiple use cases and environments, you can build an automation strategy that not only unifies teams and tools, but also creates a culture of automation across the enterprise. This might involve documenting business goals and determining how automation can help you achieve them. It can also mean setting up an automation Community of Practice (CoP) or Center of Excellence (CoE) to help automation practitioners learn and collaborate.
You can do more with automation
Building on the strategic foundation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), organizations are beginning to use these practices to automate IT processes at every stage of the operational life cycle. Just as IaC standardizes the build, provisioning, and deployment of infrastructure, IT teams can adopt Ops as Code and Policy as Code to codify the management, maintenance, and governance of systems after they are deployed.
How can Red Hat help?
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an end-to-end automation solution that helps enterprises configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate advanced workflows across teams and IT environments—from datacenters, across clouds, to edge locations.
Ansible Automation Platform includes all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, including an event-driven solution, analytics, content tools, and playbooks. It allows your teams to centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, and other features that will help reduce operational complexity.
With a Red Hat subscription, you get certified content from our robust partner ecosystem, access to hosted management services, and life cycle technical support that allows your teams to create, manage, and scale automation across your organization. And you’ll get expert knowledge gained from our success with thousands of customers.
