Four Core Priorities for IT Process Automation
As enterprises prepare for future growth, many are managing digital transformation plans even as their budgets tighten in the current recession environment. The answer to achieving disruptive gains may lie in IT process automation.
Automation is the key to achieving more with fewer resources, delivering efficiency, improved productivity, stability, and control, as well as increased confidence in processes. The potential for impact is expansive across the enterprise. It can not only solve an immediate challenge, but also help the organization plan for how to best use resources in the future.
Through IT process automation, chief information officers (CIOs) are able to take employees currently focused on manual tasks and use their skills in a more strategic way. For instance, there’s no need for an employee to spend time copying files or repeatedly entering a code.
For organizations wondering how to begin with automation, there are four core areas that provide a quick introduction into automation integration and that reduce technical debt:
Coded Infrastructure: Teams can eliminate human error and make infrastructure changes efficiently when the provisioning of new virtual machines is automated, in addition to the templates, containers, and components below them. Provisioning can be reduced down to minutes and allow developers to keep making progress, rather than waiting for system resources.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery of Code: This can be orchestrated for code pipelines through automated processes that quicken the pace of a software release. It allows for speeding up the time to market while enabling efficient development of high-quality software. The benefits include decreased iteration time, reduced cost of failure, and improved continuity, serving in turn to support developer satisfaction and help attract the best talent among programmers.
Configuration: IT process automation equips enterprises to produce consistent software prerequisites that allow for code to run. Resources are provisioned exactly for application requirements, while improving security and increasing agility. When the systems are healthy, it’s easier to detect and address any issues.
Automated Compliance Evaluation: Automation can allow for security and audit checks on data as it moves around enterprise systems. Security is applied as code that continually delivers rules and reduces risk through a comprehensive integration. This enables enterprises to be able to demonstrate to auditors that their compliance has been in constant monitoring and any issues have been immediately identified and addressed.
When a crisis presents itself, automation may be accelerated to deal with a flood of cancellations, a rush of orders, or overwhelming customer requests. It’s often in these moments of struggling to maintain business continuity that enterprises identify areas of automation opportunity – and they rarely return to the manual version.
Enterprises that prioritize IT process automation will widen their edge over competitors because as new automation opportunities emerge, they’ll be ready to take advantage of them. To learn more about how to begin implementing automated processes in your organization, contact us at One Connect.