Why automate?

Automation helps businesses on their path to digital transformation. Organizations today are dealing with major disruption—think Airbnb, Amazon, etc. They’re challenged with supporting their employees and partners, reaching new customers, and providing new, innovative products and services faster.

They want and need to be the ones disrupting their own industries.

Automation is critical to managing, changing, and adapting not only your IT infrastructure, but the way your business operates through its processes. By simplifying change through automation, you gain the time and energy to focus on innovation. The automated enterprise's goal is to get work done faster. This frees up IT staff to focus on bigger issues, resolving them, and—in turn—making them routine and eligible for automation.

Advantages of automation

Automation isn’t necessarily meant to replace people. Some of that will happen as a result of removing steps that require human interaction, but the focus and advantages are found in productivity, consistency, and efficiency. This is the paradox of automation—as you become efficient using automation, human involvement becomes both more important and less frequent.

Instead of seeing automation as a tool that eliminates jobs, the reality is that it allows more experienced IT staff to focus on bigger problems and their solutions, rather than mundane, day-to-day, repeated tasks.

Advantages

• Greater productivity. Your staff can spend more time making a bigger impact on your business. Leave the repetition to software.

• Better reliability. By reducing the amount of human intervention, you run into less oversights and issues. All of the same things happen the same way—every time. That way you know exactly when processes, tests, updates, workflows, etc. are going to happen, how long they’ll take, and that you can trust the outcomes.

• Easier governance. More people means more potential for knowledge gaps. More knowledge gaps means one side of your business might not know what, or who, is involved on the other side. Codifying everything means better control.

Challenges

• Cost. Building an effective automation solution takes time and energy. Work with a trusted partner like Red Hat—who is able to handle the heavy lifting for you—to help you save and get running faster.

• Scope. Automation doesn’t mean intelligence. Depending on what’s automated and how it’s constructed, some parts may be vulnerable outside of that scope. Limiting automation in some aspects or functions can mitigate this concern. Your automation is only as smart and safe as how it’s implemented, so keep that in mind.

IT operations teams are asked to move faster, manage increasingly complex IT environments, and accommodate new development approaches and technologies. To manage these new demands, many organizations already automate some number of IT operations in limited, disparate areas using inflexible, ad hoc scripts or proprietary, device-specific legacy tools. While these approaches may speed specific functions, they do not scale across diverse resources and can make it difficult to share automation expertise across the organization.  

Enterprises not only need the ability to easily create automation, but they also need to be able to share and reuse automation across projects and teams with the right level of governance and control. Maybe you're already using automation and just need help scaling it. 

No matter the complexity of your environment or where you are on your IT modernization journey, creating an enterprise-wide approach to automation lets you automate not only IT processes, but also entire technologies, teams, and organizations. 

With the right automation solution in place, you can deploy new applications and services faster, manage IT infrastructure more efficiently, and see an increase in app development productivity. Use automation to improve provisioning, configuration management, patching, app orchestration, and security and compliance.

Red Hat believes automation is a strategic and foundational component of IT modernization and digital transformation. Our solutions, services, and training give you the control you need to automate your business so you can focus on innovation and moving forward.

So whether you’re just getting started with automation or want to expand across new use cases, Red Hat’s solutions can help you to scale automation across your business.

Red Hat works with the greater open source community on automation technologies. Our engineers help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure your business and IT performs and remains stable and secure. 

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations scale IT automation, manage complex deployments, and govern automation. It allows users to centralize and control their IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, and more to reduce operational complexity.

Because it is based on an intuitive automation language, Ansible Automation Platform allows users to coordinate between multiple teams and individuals to share, vet, and manage automation content.

Ansible Automation Platform’s clear syntax and task-based nature makes it possible to orchestrate server configuration and management, and application deployments tasks and ensure tasks happen when they need to and in the right order.