COMMENT
“Even
the most
talented
member
of your IT
operations
team is
human, and
humans are
prone to
mistakes.”
A
utomation is not merely a technology choice.
First and foremost, it’s a business choice. Without
automation, supporting the growth of your business
can be increasingly complex, to the point of becoming
impossible beyond a certain scale. If it’s true that software
is eating the world, as the well-known venture capitalist
Marc Andreessen said in 2011, and if it’s true that every
company is becoming a technology company, as the Chief
of Research at Gartner said in 2013, then automation
becomes a must-have tool in the hands of business, not
just of the IT organisation.
Here are four key reasons why automation is critical to
managing a large-scale IT environment:
•
•
•
•
Less waste
Less complexity
Fewer mistakes
Less uncertainty
Less waste: Automation optimises IT operations
Highways are a good analogy to explain the concept.
When the population in a geographical area grows, the
government is forced to develop the infrastructure to support
the additional cars. In some places, these highways must be
equipped with toll gateways to regulate the access, and toll
gateways must be operated by humans, each performing
thousands of repetitive operations per day.
In turn, the newly built highways attract even more citizens
in the region, and more cars on the road. The government
can deal with the spike in traffic either by adding more
gateways and hiring new people to manage them, or it can
make the existing highways more efficient by implementing
automated barriers and automated access systems.
Electronic tolls enable more cars to access the highway in
the same amount of time that human operators take: by
eliminating the brief stop at the toll and the interaction
between the driver and the human operator or the cash
machine, automation allows each car to move through the
toll at a higher speed, in less time.
In the same way, 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.
Less complexity: Automation orchestrates
sophisticated services
Beyond a certain point, success often leads to a
diversification in the market demand, as your popularity
attracts a broader audience. In an enterprise environment,
this dynamic implies that some of the Lines of Business
(LoBs) that you are serving may eventually start requesting
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