COMMENT
new offerings at a fraction of the time
otherwise required to re-engineer the
whole stack from scratch.
“IT automation can help your
operations team to manage
more workloads over the
same working hours, reducing
the need to hire more staff
to support the growth of the
infrastructure.”
focus and precision – skills
that not all team members
may possess.
Back to our car analogy. The
autopilot feature recently
introduced by Tesla is a good
example of how automation
can assist humans and help
them to avoid mistakes.
Driving is certainly a complex
task but yet manageable by
humans. Automation here,
while not yet perfect, can be
two times more reliable than
human drivers.
Less uncertainty:
Automation prepares you
for the future
So far I have talked about
the value of automation in
facing today’s challenges,
www.intelligentcio.com
but automation can do more than
that. Automation can also better equip
organisations to face the uncertainty
of the future. As an abstraction layer
interconnecting many elements of the
enterprise IT and operating at scale
with minimal effort, automation can be
seen as an extensible platform that can
evolve and adapt to market changes.
Automation as a platform builds upon
the foundational elements you already
have in your computing environment,
simplifying the evolution of existing
services and the creation of completely
new ones. For example, automation
can simplify the deployment of existing
applications across new public and
private cloud infrastructures that
don’t exist today. In another example,
automation can make it easier to
combine new IT components, like a new
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
service, with existing ones, to help create
Let’s take the automatic gearbox
analogy to another level. Think
about a highway with a long
queue of cars progressing at a very
low, tedious speed. To reduce the
annoyance of driving in queues,
several manufacturers introduced a
technology called Adaptive Cruise
Control (ACC). ACC uses information
from sensors like radars and cameras
to instruct the car’s control systems
to automatically follow the vehicle in
front, adjusting speed and stopping
when necessary. The development of
such technology, as with autopilot,
has been possible thanks to the
automation of several car components,
pioneered by automatic transmission.
In this example, automatic transmission
is a key building block for car innovation.
As car manufacturers introduce more
and more new features, the automatic
transmission acts both as an enabler
and actuator of many new capabilities.
In summary, automation is not just
a great tool to deal with today’s
market demands, but it can also be
a fundamental building block to help
sustain the growth and evolution of your
business tomorrow. However, as I said at
the beginning of this post, automation
is just one of the many technological,
operational, and cultural elements
that you may need to introduce in
your organisation as part of a digital
transformation journey. Automation
alone is not enough.
About the author
Massimo Ferrari is Management
Strategy Director at Red Hat. Prior to
Red Hat, Massimo has been an IT
industry analyst and consultant for more
than a decade, helping Fortune 1000
and Fortune Global 2000 companies
in the transformation journey towards
IT as a Service and cloud computing
adoption. Massimo has been one of the
early consultants and trainers to push
virtualisation technologies and cloud
computing into enterprises. n
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