The IT automation imperative: What executives need to know
Accelerate your business with automation
Your organization likely adopts new technologies for a number of reasons—from creating efficiencies to modernizing your environment and more.
But the truth is, if the latest and greatest solution doesn’t deliver tangible business benefits, what’s the point?
Automation is a solution that can deliver on several business benefits that span a number of areas, from business resiliency to improved speed in bringing innovations to market and a solid return on investment (ROI).
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools won’t fix broken or manual processes and operations. Modern IT organizations need to start by establishing a solid automated foundation in order to keep IT infrastructure and systems reliable, resilient, and security-focused. By establishing end-to-end automated workflows that span infrastructure, application, networks, IT service management (ITSM), security, and more, you can successfully position your organization for the successful adoption of new innovations, including generative AI (gen AI).
Fill skill gaps and maximize IT investments with automation
The rise in automation adoption has been spurred on by a number of factors—including resource constraints, technical debt, and skill gaps—that can limit an organization’s growth.
With the right automation strategy and the right automation platform—such as Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform and the extensive Ansible ecosystem it provides access to—businesses can tackle these challenges through a few key features and options.
Event-driven automation:
Organizations can proactively monitor their entire suite of IT systems for any changing conditions and automatically action them, without their team needing to take manual actions. This not only supports existing talent by removing major burdens from their workload, but can also help fill skill gaps by supplementing an existing team’s capabilities.
Gen AI:
Gen AI can help individuals and teams to create, adopt, and maintain Ansible content with reduced complexity and increased efficiency and accuracy. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed—a gen AI tool included with Ansible Automation Platform—turns natural language prompts into code snippets, making it simpler for users to adopt and increase automation across their organization and its many domains.
Certified and validated content:
Some organizations may be hesitant to adopt automation, or hesitant to extend their existing automation efforts, due to a shortage of automation talent or experience within their team. With an extensive library of Ansible Certified Content Collections and Ansible validated content, teams can start building their own automation on the foundation of prebuilt and pretested automation content from Red Hat and trusted industry partners, which not only provides peace of mind, but also helps them decrease their time to value significantly.
Cloud-native deployment options:
Technical debt can leave businesses with platforms, tools, applications, or coding that may have solved a short-term problem when first implemented, but is now suboptimal to efficient IT operations and causing more problems than it solves. One of the keys to overcoming technical debt is flexibility, and more specifically in this case, deployment flexibility. Ansible Automation Platform is offered in a range of cloud-native deployment options for many of the major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Automation generates substantial day-to-day efficiencies … Development teams benefit from greatly reducing the friction associated with provisioning and deploying the IT resources they require. Employees benefit from higher-quality applications that experience fewer outages.[1]
The business value of Ansible Automation Platform
An IDC business value whitepaper, sponsored by Red Hat, explored the value and benefits realized by customers using Ansible Automation Platform. These organizations used Ansible Automation Platform to standardize and automate IT operations, container, and configuration activities across hybrid and multicloud environments, including public and private clouds, on-premise, and edge locations.
The whitepaper concluded that the importance of automation to a business has never been greater, and found that organizations using Ansible Automation Platform achieved:1
A strategic approach to IT automation
A combination of ever-growing factors are driving the enterprise view that automation is now mission critical.
The need for resilient, highly-available networks, the complexities of managing a hybrid cloud environment, the demand for bringing new services to market, and the persistent risks associated with managing compliance and security make automation mission critical to any modern IT strategy.
By thinking about automation strategically, and extending it throughout your organization—beyond traditional IT domains such as marketing, sales, human resources, or legal departments—your teams can move faster, operate with more predictability and efficiency, and open up new ways of working. This is because it allows you to shift manual, lowvalue tasks away from employees and refocus their efforts on higher-value work.
While IT automation won’t be embraced by every organization immediately, those that make it a strategic priority will likely have a competitive advantage.
A holistic approach to IT automation, with a unified strategy focused on your unique business needs, can help your organization achieve the speed, scale, stability, and focus on security required to operate and excel in your market, but only with the right automation solution.
When you’re looking for a holistic IT automation solution, it’s important to think about a number of factors, from portability to training. The e-book An IT executive’s guide to automation: The need for transformative automation provides a checklist for what to seek out in an IT automation solution, starting with the most critical: choosing a holistic automation platform versus a tool to manage specific problems.
What to look for in an IT automation solution
Once you understand why you want to automate and how to successfully incorporate automation into your organization, you need to choose an IT automation solution.
Don’t settle for automation tools. Look for an automation platform.
As an integral part of your organization’s digital transformation, look at automation holistically. When you can automate workloads in addition to tasks, you can change entire processes and free up employee time.
Select an automation platform that is easy to adopt.
The easier a platform is to adopt, the more likely it will be embraced across your organization. Look for a technology with an easy-to-learn programming language and shareable, certified content.
Ensure your automation platform includes management tools.
Find a platform that includes analytics, role-based access control (RBAC), and the ability to seamlessly share content.
Find an automation platform that supports multiple workloads and domains as a single solution.
As you automate, you will want flexibility and agility. As an enterprise, you potentially have thousands of containers, so you need to find an automation solution that can automate and orchestrate container deployment, networking, scalability, and availability.
Embrace an automation solution that doesn’t lock you in.
When you choose an automation platform that’s built on open source technology, you benefit from the freedom of interoperability and the absence of vendor lock-in.
Decide on a vendor that provides consulting and training solutions.
Your organization doesn’t need to manage implementation and training on your own. Find a vendor that can help you build your automation platform and educate your workforce on how to effectively use it.
Excerpted from An IT executive’s guide to automation.
668% 3-year ROI.
61% less unplanned downtime.
28% increase in public cloud management efficiencies.
68% faster to deploy new compute resources.
US$8.54M higher revenue per organization per year.
8 months to payback.
38% increase in network management team efficiencies.
36% increase in development team productivity.
23% faster to market for new products or services.
To learn more about the business value of Ansible Automation platform, read the IDC whitepaper.
Find a solution that includes event-driven automation.
Event-driven automation is the next step in the journey to end-to-end automation. It answers the need to connect intelligence, analytics, and service requests for an IT environment to automated actions so that activities can take place in a single motion. This model is ideal for high-volume, routine tasks and ITSM actions, along with responding to changing IT conditions, and more.
Look for a platform that features gen AI.
Busy teams need to create, adopt, and maintain automation code with more ease and efficiency. Gen AI services, such as Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, help platform engineers learn and automate faster while helping experienced developers validate their code to ensure trust and adherence to automation best practices.
Excerpted from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A beginner’s guide.
By applying IT automation to every aspect of your business, you can start to increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and improve flexibility within your organization.
Want to learn more about how to lead automation efforts across your organization?
Get Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A beginner’s guide for insights and industry best practices.
A single platform, many benefits
Ansible Automation Platform is designed to help organizations at any stage of their automation journey.
This multifaceted automation solution is engineered for maximum flexibility, which means that organizations can use it to automate any IT environment, at any scale, in any location.
While your end goal may be holistic automation throughout your organization, you still need to start somewhere. Here are some primary benefits that different categories, or domains, can bring to your entire organization through automation.
Automate your infrastructure to cut down on complexity
Ansible Automation Platform helps you reduce the management complexity of modern IT environments. Use a consistent solution to build, deploy, provision, and manage infrastructure across multiple and different environments, including physical, virtual, or containerized. Help your organization adapt to change, focus on security risks, and manage costs. Want to learn more? Read the e-book Automate infrastructure workflows.
Keep pace with network provisioning with automation
Use a single platform to help teams integrate across networking and even cross-domain IT processes for improved efficiency with Ansible Automation Platform. From edge devices, to increasing cloud demands, networks are growing in size and complexity. Ansible Automation Platform helps teams keep pace with network provisioning and validation, configuration management, and infrastructure awareness in a way that manual methods simply cannot.
Want to learn more? Watch the 5 great use cases for Ansible Network Automation video.
Gain stability and consistency with edge automation
Ansible Automation Platform provides a stable foundation for deploying end-to-end automation, including to the network edge, where data is generated, end-users interact with devices and systems, and services are used. As a part of Red Hat’s portfolio for edge solutions, Ansible Automation Platform provides a unified automation language that can help you build streamlined processes and management across your organization.
Approach automation with a focus on security capabilities
Ansible Automation Platform provides users with a streamlined and efficient way to automate security practices—a high priority for most organizations facing a growing number of enterprise security threats. Ansible Automation platform helps organizations respond to threats in a coordinated, unified way through a curated collection of Playbooks, modules, and roles. This includes threat hunting, incident response, and an enriched approach to investigations. Want to learn more? Read the e-book Simplify your security operations center.
According to the IBM Security 2023 Cost of a data breach report, organizations with extensive use of AI and automation in their security operations had breach life cycles that were 108 days shorter than those without the use of AI and automation.4
Reduce complexity with cloud automation
Simplify your application deployment with automation Ansible Automation Platform helps you ensure your cloud deployments work effectively and efficiently across public, private, hybrid or multicloud environments, taking the guesswork out of the process. Use Ansible Automation Platform for provisioning, configuration, and compliance.
Want to learn more? Read about cloud support with Ansible Automation Platform or read the e-book Connect your hybrid cloud environment with IT automation.
Simplify your application deployment with automation
Automate application deployments with Ansible Automation platform. It’s the simplest way to deploy your applications and services all from a single platform, regardless of where they are. Playbooks, which are simple to write and maintain, make your installations, upgrades, and day-to-day management reliable and repeatable.
Want to learn more? Read the use case for application deployment.
Prepare for the future with mission-critical automation
Mission-critical automation can include essential IT processes such as security monitoring and system updates and is often essential to keeping a business up and running.
Supporting mission-critical automation should be a primary focus when any organization is building out their automation strategy and selecting their automation platform. Consider the following factors for your own mission-critical automation approach.
Automation is how platform engineering extends across domains.
To keep up with security and compliance needs at scale, your development and operations teams need to be able to work more efficiently.
Look for an automation platform that helps your teams deliver consistent, compliant automation service across domains.
Automation as Code is the key to enterprise AI adoption.
AI is not a fix for broken and manual processes. It needs a codified operational foundation in order to deliver value and results.
You will need to standardize, codify, and operationalize an IT operations code base as the foundation for your enterprise-wide AI adoption, and should look for an automation platform that supports that.
Automation is a force multiplier for enterprise workflows.
Resource constraints and technical debt make it imperative for organizations to get the most out of their existing IT investments.
Consider an automation solution and automation approach that can help you unlock the full potential of your teams and technology.
Once you’ve decided what domain to start with, it’s time to consider where to run your automation in order to deliver a consistent experience across everything, everywhere.
Ansible Automation Platform can do this because it’s container-native. This gives you the flexibility to create repeatable automation, efficiently manage it, and then scale it on demand across your:
Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company, automated around 20,000 components across their organization, including servers, firewalls, network devices, and storage devices.2
According to the IDC report Edge growth drives need for automating the last mile:3
70% of organizations view edge solutions as a key element of business transformation.
63% of organizations said automation was important to their edge infrastructure investments over the next 2 years.
74% of enterprises will increase their spend on edge solutions by an average of 37% over the next 2 years.
Learn more about automating at the network edge in the video.
We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure as part of our cloud infrastructure, so we had experience working with Red Hat technology and their teams. Ansible Automation Platform met our technical specifications and benchmarking requirements and offered local support.
Want to learn more? Read the use case for application deployment.
Datacenter for agnostic automation, integration into business workflows, or maintaining a common language or framework across multiple IT domains.
Public clouds for provisioning, application life cycle management, or cloud administration.
Hybrid cloud for infrastructure coordination, configuration management, life cycle management, or business continuity.
Network edge for event-driven automation, disaster recovery, mass configuration, or remote updates and compliance.
Want to learn more about Ansible Automation Platform? Get a product overview, including features and benefits, in this datasheet.
A snapshot of success
A real-world look at achieving business value with automation comes through the results of organizations who have adopted an automation strategy.
Here are some stories of organizations that are successfully using Ansible Automation Platform.
Asian Development Bank saves hundreds of hours by automating infrastructure management with Red Hat
Asian Development Bank:6
- Saved hundreds of work hours every year by automating database cloning, patching, and recovery.
- Improved infrastructure security and reliability.
- Optimized automation strategy with expert guidance.
Ansible Automation Platform helps us complete work faster, safer, and with more resiliency. Red Hat is helping to make the Asian Development Bank more modern and adaptable.
Ulta Beauty standardizes on Red Hat for automation and service delivery transformation
Ulta Beauty Group:7
- Migrated its SAP S4/HANA system to Microsoft Azure with minimal downtime and outages.
- Reduced deployment times from 3 weeks to less than a day and saved thousands of work hours by automating deployment.
- Improved delivery times, delivery volume, repeatability, and time to value with automation.
The built-in capabilities of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provide an accelerator in a box. It’s the de facto standard that many of our vendors and partners also use to write scripts to install, configure, and maintain their technology.
Swisscom gains efficiency by standardizing and expanding automation
Swisscom:8
- Saved approximately 3,000 hours per year in manual operating system tasks.
- Provided self-service capabilities for IT tasks, simplifying and accelerating common tasks.
- Improved collaboration with shared playbooks, know-how, and experience.
- Accelerated understanding with learning from Red Hat experts.
We are seeing synergy effects where different teams can all use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform because it can manage the different products.
Agile Defense simplifies security compliance with automation
Agile Defense:9
- Reduced customer time spent on audits by 98%.
- Brought DuroSuite—Agile Defense’s security compliance tool developed with Red Hat products and technical guidance—to market faster.
- Achieved accreditation to open new doors in a competitive market.
Agile Defense’s key contract vehicles for pursuing opportunities, combined with Red Hat’s innovative products and emerging technologies, form transformational success.
What could automation look like in your organization?
How could automation benefit your business? What could your organization do if your teams were connected and your automation was coordinated?
Imagine uniting teams, eliminating isolated groups, and:
Accelerating speed to market.
Scaling hybrid and multicloud environments.
Maintaining continuous compliance.
Fostering a DevOps culture.
Increasing infrastructure stability.
Or more easily automating tasks and creating a collaborative DevOps environment while:
Lowering end-to-end production costs.
Reducing complexity in your IT environment.
Decreasing mean time to repair.
Minimizing human errors and downtime.
Focusing on eliminating security vulnerabilities
How to launch enterprise automation
- Start small, think big. Begin your automation journey by automating simple, often-repeated tasks to see the benefits quickly.
- Grow into automating more complex tasks, across domains, and throughout full IT processes.
- Appoint an automation architect to help your IT organization adopt an automationfirst mindset, and help you figure out where to start and how to progress. Learn more about this critical role in The automation architect’s handbook.
Get on the right path by working with the Red Hat Executive Briefing Center. Connect with executives, technical thought leaders, and product owners to assess and address the business challenges that are unique to your organization.
Where do you go from here?
The problems you can solve, the breakthroughs you can make, and the value you can realize with the Ansible Automation Platform are too many to count. But how do you get started?
IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat. “The Business Value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.” Document #US51839824, March 2024.
Red Hat case study. “Swisscom gains efficiency by standardizing and expanding automation,” 6 Dec. 2023.
IDC Spotlight, sponsored by Red Hat. “Edge Growth Drives Need for Automating the Last Mile.” Document #US50598823, April 2023
“Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023.” IBM, accessed Jan. 2024.
Red Hat case study. “AIA Group automates IT provisioning with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform,” 1 April 2022.
Red Hat case study. “Asian Development Bank saves hundreds of hours by automating infrastructure management with Red Hat,” 16 May 2022.
Red Hat case study. “Ulta Beauty standardizes on Red Hat for automation and service delivery transformation,” accessed 12 March 2024.
Red Hat case study. “Swisscom gains efficiency by standardizing and expanding automation,” 6 Dec. 2023
Red Hat case study. “Agile Defense simplifies security compliance with automation,” 22 Jan. 2024.
