The convergence of technology in this digital age is phenomenal. At the core, every organization is looking forward to a single speedy solution that provides them with the opportunity to streamline their operational efficiency and cut costs of IT functionalities. From the release of application to customer support, every aspect of the enterprise needs faster solutions. The competitive distinctness, customer loyalty, and good business outcomes are all dependent on the acceleration of business processes.
While the legacy IT infrastructure is still essential, it has become more of a utility. Enterprises today need an agile, flexible and quickly scalable technology foundation to drive business, which has pushed it to the back seat. Companies with traditional technology architectures, therefore, face a predicament: on how to strike a balance between the present and required state of IT infrastructure. To achieve this balance, the first step should be to discard is IT’s an obsession with legacy systems. And the second would be to adopt – IT Infrastructure Automation.
A business can only move as fast as its IT infrastructure. Automation accelerates the complete business process, not just the IT infrastructure. With automation, enterprises can explore and take advantage of various opportunities. Such as:
- Adoption of DevOps
DevOps is the path towards the agility that organizations require for releasing better quality products. The adoption of DevOps and its integration in the functionalities require infrastructure automation. Research by Forrester suggests that enterprises have achieved only 20% of the benefits of automation as its implementation is limited. Proper functioning of DevOps requires full infrastructure automation throughout the lifecycle of the process.
- Self-Service Portals and Better User Experience
The benefits of service catalog are expanding beyond IT processes to various areas of businesses. From supplier management (contract renewal management, bid review) to HR (joining, benefits, and compensation), it can benefit many other parts of a business as well. These catalogs accelerate business productivity, and automation accelerates service delivery. For full utilization of self-service portals, companies need to move towards business process automation. Automating every repeatable workflow in the process provides the full business value of self-service portals.
- Maximum Utilization of Cloud
Even as most of the organizations are utilizing cloud infrastructure, there are many untapped benefits in the cloud that can provide value to businesses. Smart infrastructure automation provides methods for making the best use of various cloud opportunities at a faster rate. Automation also provides more control of cloud activities by dividing the workload and then allocating it amongst different clouds (private/hybrid/public).
- Programmable Infrastructure
The importance and standard of data centres are changing rapidly across organizations. The data centres today are everywhere due to the availability of cloud storage. They can also be on a hosted site, various social storage platforms, or at any service providers facility. The ability to orchestrate and automate infrastructure facilities provides enterprises with high-level data security. Automation allows programming storage as a service through hosted sites, secondary data centres, social platforms, and public clouds.
- Bi-modal IT
IT has always been a strategic and innovative partner of the business process. While continuing to fulfill the service level agreements, IT also provides better security controls, reduces costs and maintains operational capabilities. Bi-modal IT, which is the management of two separate modes of IT delivery – one focused on stability and other on agility, is a sustainable solution for businesses in the advancing digital world. Automation acts as a catalyst for transitioning the traditional IT methods to bi-modal IT. Furthermore, automation can accelerate IT processes and provide stability through cost savings.
- Reducing Costs
IT infrastructure automation is also the primary factor in reducing the costs of delivering excellent quality services and improving the user experience. Automation helps in removing defects and outages; thus, enabling IT to optimize the resource capacity better. It also allows control of labor allocation and utilization across the entire business process.
IT infrastructure automation is the key to both cost-optimization of traditional IT and digital transformation. Enterprises can achieve higher productivity with greater efficiency by increasing their business agility through automation. Cut in labor costs, optimization of resources, improved user experience and adoption of DevOps are only some benefits that automation has in store. The unexplored opportunities of the future are no longer a dilemma because of automation.