IT automation or IT infrastructure automation is a key strategic process that aims at reducing manual intervention and human error in the operation of your IT infrastructure, thus improving the reaction time and the productivity of your business. IT automation allows teams to operate modern infrastructure environments, whether they are on premise, in the cloud or hybrid, and manage the performance, scale, usage peaks and uptime of the most complex services.
What can be helpful to succeede in IT Automation?
There are many habits that can help you to successfully transition from manual IT operation to IT Automation:
- Define a simple and testable objective/outcome
- Arguably the most important of the prerequisites. It cannot be stressed enough that the outcome of an automated process needs to be simple, clearly defined and testable so that you have a objective way to determine if the automated procedure has been succesful.
- Choose complexity over convolution
- Let every procedure to be small, do one simple thing and do it incredibly well. Take the time to think about what you want yo achieve, break it down to smaller pieces and tackle them one at the time.
- Prepare a contingency plan
- Despite the amount of efforts and no matter how thorough your testing is, things can go south pretty fast and pretty badly; that’s where you need to have a contingency plan, restore the previous state and start over.
- Encourage open involvement of all the stakeholders
- Inputs and perspectives from all stakeholders is extremely important to understand the impact and all the ramification to the automated changes your procedure is going to apply.
- Choose the best practices and principles, over the tools
- There is an abundance of technology that can help you achieve your objectives, and we encourage you to have a look around and make your own judgement. However, tools are subject to a high pace of change and evolution, they are often trend driven, or just volatile. A solid understanding of the best principles of IT design and operation will take you much further than any tool; they will give you a more stable base for the decision you’re going to take, and help you stay away from vendor lock-in.
- Start your continuous improvement journey
- Make an honest assessment of the amount of time, energy and resources spent in each area of your IT, find a small, simple objective whose automation would prove beneficial for those involved in it. Start your journey.