What is infrastructure automation?

Infrastructure automation is the use of technology that performs tasks with reduced human assistance. It lets your IT teams more easily control hardware, software, networking, and data storage components, while spending less time manually overseeing it all. By allowing automation within your infrastructure, you can deliver IT services and solutions more reliably, curtail errors, and scale faster as your organization’s needs grow.

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Infrastructure automation includes 2 key components: IT infrastructure and IT automation. 

IT infrastructure comprises the components required to operate and manage enterprise IT environments. These components include hardware, software, networking components, operating systems (OSes), and data storage—all of which are used to deliver IT services and solutions. IT infrastructure products are available as software applications that run on top of existing IT resources—like software-defined storage—or as online solutions offered by service providers—like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

IT automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. Automation helps you speed up processes, scale environments, and build continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. There are many kinds of automation, including:

• IT automation.
• Business automation.
• Robotic process automation.
• Industrial automation.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Machine learning.
• Deep learning.

As organizations grow, so can their infrastructure size and complexity. Combine that with limited time and staff, and IT teams can find themselves struggling to keep up. This leads to all sorts of issues: delayed updates, last-minute patching, and missed resource deliveries. It can quickly escalate if left unchecked, not only burning out IT teams, but hampering your organization’s ability to keep key business pipelines running.  

Automating common management tasks can help you regain control and visibility over your infrastructure. By automating things like provisioning, configuring, deploying, patching and updates, and decommissioning, you can free up IT resources to tackle more critical and complex work, while simplifying operations at scale. If your business needs exceed your current infrastructure capabilities, automation makes it much easier to add things like virtual machines or additional workflows to accommodate growth.

You also reduce the chance for human error by automating things like task execution during off hours, remediation, and more. Limiting the amount of human intervention necessary to address smaller tasks can lead to quicker resolutions and more effective operations.

Operating systems

Within larger organizations, ensuring everyone uses the same OS and is on the latest secured release can be vital to keeping business operations running smoothly. It’s challenging for IT teams to manually vet and provision OS releases while supporting entire technology configurations that may be using outdated systems. Automating the management of these systems helps your enterprise stay compliant with less stress on your staff. 

Keep reading about OS automation

Security

Endpoint devices are often the most targeted attack surface of an IT infrastructure. Using automation to integrate specialized tools, such as endpoint protection platforms (EPPs), can help detect and remediate malicious threats quickly before they can spread. You can also use automation to proactively hunt and quarantine potential threats, which your IT team can then review. This reduces the amount of time necessary for manual incident response. 

Configuration management

Your IT environment contains a variety of hardware and software. Consistently managing it all by hand can lead to higher maintenance costs and an inability to meet strict service-level agreements (SLAs) and compliance requirements. Automation gives you predictable and repeatable processes for managing configurations across OSes more consistently.

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is an end-to-end automation platform that comes with all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, including task automation with playbooks, a visual dashboard, an event-driven solution, and analytics. It also includes access to certified and validated Ansible content called Ansible Content Collections. This makes it even easier for your IT teams to automate quickly with proven modules and playbooks used by thousands of customers. 

The experts at Red Hat Services can help your business start automating with Ansible Automation Platform and help expand automation across your organization. They can provide hands-on training, mentorship, and specialized courses to prepare your teams for whatever needs arise in your automation journey. In addition to educating your team, they can also apply real-world experience to help you reevaluate and refine your existing infrastructure workflows. 

Read more about automating with Red Hat

Red Hat offers interactive labs in a preconfigured Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform environment. You can use these labs to experiment, practice, and learn how to create, manage, and scale network and IT practices efficiently—from rapid development and deployment, to simplified operations and analytics, to consistent end-to-end user experiences.

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