What is IT automation?

IT automation is the use of software to perform repetitive IT tasks and processes with reduced human assistance. This software works within the scope of tools, frameworks, and predefined, repeatable instructions to carry out tasks on IT systems. By replacing manual tasks with automation, IT teams can deliver applications and services with increased speed and consistency.

Automation is key to IT optimization and digital transformation. Modern, dynamic IT environments need to be able to scale faster than ever, and IT automation is vital to making that happen. It helps businesses increase operational efficiency by connecting their cloud or virtualized environments to infrastructure, networking, storage, and security tools. It’s also critical for organizations looking to adopt new and emerging technologies—like artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing. 
 

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IT teams play a crucial role in addressing the business challenges brought on by rapid technological change. But the increasing complexity of modern IT environments can make it harder to scale operations quickly—especially if IT staff are relying on manual processes to complete common, repetitive tasks. 

Now a strategic imperative, IT automation helps organizations:

• Reduce errors, risks, and high costs associated with manual tasks and processes.
• Scale operations in response to changes in demand.
• Speed up the delivery of applications and services.
• Increase the efficiency of IT operations (ITOps).
• Ensure more controlled, consistent governance across teams and tasks.
• Improve security by identifying, preventing, and responding to threats more quickly.
• Bring disconnected teams together to solve common problems.

Learn more about the benefits of automating your enterprise

If an IT task is repeatable, then it can probably be partly or fully automated. This means organizations can use automation to achieve faster, more consistent, and more efficient operations across a variety of use cases and environments. Automation can also increase the speed and efficiency of specific technologies and methodologies, from containers to DevOps to broader areas like cloud, edge computing, and security.

While IT automation has many applications, some common use cases include:

Provisioning
Provisioning is the process of setting up IT infrastructure—like servers, cloud environments, and networking components. It also involves configuring end-user permissions to applications, services, and resources through a variety of identity and access management (IAM) methods. 

Since provisioning often requires IT teams to repeat the same processes over and over, it can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Automated provisioning solves this problem by codifying infrastructure and creating repeatable automation workflows that can be run again and again. 

Configuration management
Configuration management is the process of maintaining systems, applications, and components in a desired state. It involves defining the settings for these components to ensure consistent performance and establishing a clear approach to documentation, maintenance, and change control. System administrators use configuration management tools to set up IT systems—like servers and workstations—and then build and maintain other servers and workstations with the same settings. They can also use the same tools to identify systems that have strayed from a desired state and need to be updated, configured, or patched. 

Due to the complexity and scale of modern environments, IT teams use automation to deploy and decommission infrastructure components more quickly. And by replacing manual configuration tasks with automated workflows, teams see fewer issues in performance and security. 

Orchestration
Modern IT infrastructure is increasingly complex. And the more complex it becomes, the more challenging it is to manage all of the involved components. Organizations may be juggling infrastructure that spans on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. And even if IT teams are automating a variety of tasks, they need to ensure that those tasks work together to successfully perform their intended functions. 

Orchestration is the coordinated execution of multiple automation tasks or processes. While IT automation uses software to perform tasks with reduced human intervention, orchestration helps organize those tasks into fully automated workflows. This means that individual tasks can execute when they need to and prompt the appropriate follow-up tasks to begin without human assistance. 

IT migration
IT migration is the movement of data or software from one system to another. This can include cloud migration, data migration, application migration, operating system migration, or virtual machine (VM) migration. 

IT migration projects commonly involve many moving parts and requirements that are highly specific to an organization’s needs. Automating IT migration can contribute to faster and smoother projects, reducing the errors that can result from repetitive manual processes.

Application deployment
Whether you use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) or a more traditional approach, development pipelines rely on robust, automated systems to meet modern expectations. Successful application deployment depends on the automation of essential tasks and capabilities, especially during the testing phase. 

Deployment automation helps developers move software between testing and production environments with automated processes. This leads to repeatable and reliable deployments across the software delivery cycle. It also means developers can configure necessary services from the beginning and get applications and their artifacts up and running quickly—all via a common, transparent approach that’s understandable by IT staff.

Security
IT security is about establishing a set of systems, solutions, and strategies to protect the integrity of technology ecosystems from attack, damage, or unauthorized access. Although security was often a checkpoint at the end of the software development cycle in the past, businesses today aim to make it a part of the infrastructure and product lifecycle as early as possible. 

Security automation uses software to automatically detect, prevent, investigate, and remediate cyberattacks or similar threats. Its purpose is to reduce the frequency and severity of security incidents while minimizing the need for human intervention. This speeds up the detection and remediation of security issues while reducing errors in resource configuration and compliance.

Explore all use cases

Whether you’re automating a single task or entire IT processes, your organization can get more out of your automation investment by expanding adoption to new teams and use cases. To do this, you can develop a comprehensive automation strategy that unifies disconnected teams, tools, and workflows.

Expanding automation adoption isn’t always easy. Skill gaps, inefficient processes, and cultural challenges are some of the most common reasons organizations struggle to embrace automation. Building an automation strategy can help you identify the specific challenges your organization needs to overcome to make automation a core part of your IT operations.

While the activities involved in building an automation strategy may vary from one organization to the next, key steps include:

• Identifying and documenting current business goals you can achieve with automation.
• Assessing your organization’s automation maturity.
• Mapping existing automation efforts to your goals.
• Evaluating the IT frameworks you currently use—like DevOps or platform engineering—and considering ways to improve them.
• Building opportunities for collaboration—like starting an automation Center of Excellence (CoE), Community of Practice (CoP), or both.

By taking a strategic approach to automation, you can foster a culture of automation that prioritizes upskilling, knowledge sharing, and collaboration across teams. This not only helps you maximize your technology investments, but it also opens up a pathway to greater agility and innovation. 

Learn more about building an IT automation strategy

While automating a few tasks in isolation still has its benefits, you can get more value and efficiency by expanding automation to additional areas of your IT Operations. You can do this by adopting a unified automation solution that helps you align teams around a common framework and orchestrate automation across use cases and environments.

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is an end-to-end automation platform that has all the tools you need to create, manage, and scale automation across the enterprise. It reduces operational complexity and provides a consistent user experience across teams, breaking down barriers between architects, developers, and system administrators. Ansible Automation Platform also provides you with the capabilities to manage dozens of IT automation use cases—including provisioning, configuration management, cloud, and virtualization. 

An Ansible Automation Platform subscription includes an event-driven solution, an expanding suite of development tools, and access to certified and validated Ansible content via Ansible Content Collections. These bundles of content contain modules, playbooks, and documentation to help your cross-functional teams start automating fast.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced automation developer, Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant helps you learn, create, and maintain Ansible content more efficiently. This generative AI service accepts prompts entered by a user and then interacts with IBM watsonx foundation models to produce code recommendations built on Ansible best practices.

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