Why are businesses increasingly turning to automation?
Automation and your IT estate
A perfect storm of events has coalesced around IT resource provision. It has led to the increasing adoption of automation.
The case for automation will only get stronger as the storm gathers force: let’s review what factors are driving this trend and how you can best automate your IT estate.
The three factors leading to the automation of IT
- High expectations
End users increasingly have very high expectations that things will be delivered fast. Automation helps enable IT services that can be supplied ‘on demand’. It radically reduces the wait time from a few weeks to the instant availability of new environments that is now the norm. - Clearing the decks
As IT stacks become more complex, time-consuming but petty tasks which sap IT resources need to be cleared from workloads. Automation allows more strategic work to be carried out across more complex environments. These environments must be managed through multiple technologies and skill sets. IT automation is able to respond to this demand by freeing up the time of highly skilled consultants. - Consistency
No matter how tightly governed operations are by the runbook, when manual intervention is at play discrepancies will appear in how the same task is completed. These seemingly minor variants can lead to unexpected outcomes which is why automation is the only viable way to ensure that tasks are completed consistently every single time.
How Ansible makes it easy to deliver app and IT automation
Ansible is an IT automation platform that makes it simple for you to deploy your systems and applications.
You can try out this open source platform with no outlay: if you like what you see you can arrange a commercial support agreement with Red Hat when you take the platform into production.
Ansible is versatile: because there are no agents, it offers highly flexible and easy-to-configure systems management.
Ansible is refreshingly straightforward: in case of configuration error, you simply roll everything back and Ansible’s Playbook creates a workflow of tasks that will complete activities such as patching a system or environment provisioning.
For those who want to make things even more intuitive, Ansible Tower provides a user-friendly graphical user interface for your inventory, dashboards and playbooks.
It is thanks to its highly flexible and configurable nature that Ansible can be used to solve many automation problems.
These include:
- Configuration management
- Application deployment
- Continuous delivery
- Provisioning
- Orchestration
- Security automation
Ansible can be used with your AIX and IBM i estates to perform basic maintenance operations such as patching, application/program deployment, work management, security management or the running of ad-hoc scripts, CL or SQL for specific administrative tasks.
But Ansible also makes it possible to go beyond administrative activities. It allows you to automate the building, testing and deployment processes that support continuous development workstreams.
It can even integrate with IBM Cloud Automation Manager (CAM) for the deployment of workloads in either the cloud or on site.
Ansible’s ability to work with heterogeneous environments across platforms allows automated activity to build or modify both Power and x86 environments.
The case for automating your IT estate continues to get stronger. What’s driving this trend and how can you best automate your IT estate? Share on XAutomation, Ansible and Northdoor
It is already clear that automation will be the lynch-pin that allows businesses to deliver more efficient IT solutions at a higher level of service.
Ansible offers a compelling way for businesses to automate their IT thanks to its cross-platform deployment and ease of use.
As an IBM Platinum partner, a Specialist in IBM Power and Storage infrastructure, and a Microsoft Gold partner, Northdoor can help guide you take advantage of the opportunities that Ansible opens out.
Want to talk app and IT automation? Contact us.