INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE BUSINESS
Automation as a platform builds
upon the foundational elements
you already have in your
computing environment.
focus and precision – skills that not all
team members may possess.
Less uncertainty
Massimo Ferrari is Management Strategy
Director at Red Hat.
applications of increasing complexity,
from the multi-tier service composition to
the configuration of ancillary components
such as networking and firewalls.
Less mistakes
Even the most talented member of your IT
operations team is human, and humans
are prone to mistakes. The larger and
more complex an environment, the higher
the chances for mistakes.
For example, large-scale environments
easily force the IT organisation to deal with
time pressure and stress. The psychological
stress comes from the realisation that
a task, even a simple one, cannot be
accomplished across all the managed
machines in the allocated amount of time
with a low probability of errors.
It must be also considered that growing
complexity leads to more articulated
operations that need to be performed.
Highly complex tasks require constant
So far, we talked about the value of
automation in facing today’s challenges,
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 on 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 service, with existing
ones, to help create new offerings at a
fraction of the time otherwise required to
re-engineer the whole stack from scratch.
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.
Roads and vehicle analogy
Highways are a good analogy
to explain the concept of
automation. 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.
Let’s use a different analogy to
explain how automation can simplify
by orchestrating complex systems:
the automatic transmission in a car.
In modern cars, the transmission
is managed by a computer which
operates the gearbox and the clutch,
coordinating them with engine,
brakes, wheels and many other
components. Automating the gear
shifting task reduces the amount
of work required to drive because
it simplifies the entire process, for
example by removing the need to
monitor the tachometer.
In the same way, automation
tools can simplify your experience
of deploying and maintaining
applications of increasing complexity,
from the multi-tier service
composition to the configuration
of ancillary components such as
networking and firewalls.
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