7 Ways Automation Cuts Costs and Drives Value

Automation is top of mind for Infrastructure & Operations (I&O)  leaders. In a recent Gartner I&O Leaders Survey, 80% named automation as their leading choice as both an operations modernisation and technology cost optimisation initiative.  

With tough economic conditions and a global recession looming, automation provides a big opportunity to not only optimise costs and value, but to become smarter with resources in a responsible way.

However, many I&O leaders struggle to realise benefits and scale automation initiatives; or even understand what automation initiatives could actually work for them.

When starting your journey, it helps to understand the potential avenues for implementing automation. With this in mind, here are:

7 clear cut automation initiatives that will benefit every I&O team.

1. Incident and problem resolution

Incident management and problem resolution can be time-intensive and manual. By automating incident and problem response processes by codifying recovery policies, technology environments can self-heal and self-protect; improving resilience whilst delivering significant operational efficiencies. 

2. Governance and Compliance

Governance and compliance actions can be highly manual and administrative. Automation can support the provision of guardrails and policy/governance as code; all whilst continuously checking and evidencing compliance status automatically.

3. Workload automation

Workload automation can schedule, initiate, execute and manage environments across infrastructure, processes and workflows. It can also help dynamically balance workloads and optimise resources to increase reliability and resilience. 

4. Patching, repaving and vulnerability remediation

Automation can be successfully used to deliver patches and upgrades to infrastructure such as repaving. Paired with an automated way to deliver configuration changes, this will seriously improve the repeatability of the execution of these tasks and minimise human involvement that can often result in mistakes and outages; moving towards ‘zero touch’ operations.

5. Monitoring and observability

Automation can take monitoring and observability to the next level by assessing performance, tracking experience and availability for infrastructure and applications; ultimately managing; anticipating, monitoring, responding and restoring automatically.

6. Server provisioning 

Automating server provisioning can often provide immediate tangible benefits and eliminates one of the most common I&O manual tasks. Automated server builds are typically required to support and enable continuous delivery and other DevOps practices. 

7. Application deployment

Allows software or code to move between different phases of the delivery lifecycle, for example from testing to production environments. Automation can increase delivery cadence and remove bottlenecks around processes such as manual testing to deliver high-quality services faster. 

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