Want to be an Automation Hero? Meet your trusty sidekicks: Superautomation & Everything-as-Code

71% of organisations are increasing their use of automation across every part of their application lifecycle, according to Gartner.

Why? Because it can deliver significant productivity gains and improve your overall product reliability. But organisations can find that as their automation initiatives mature, tool sprawl and cognitive overload can become an additional challenge to overcome.

90% of CIOs believe they are negatively impacted by “complexity debt” (Gartner)

Calling the Automation Heroes

Automation Heroes foster a culture of automation-first, whilst reining in that sprawl. They can do so by identifying platform-based solutions which can implement complex rule engines and which can orchestrate work across multiple systems.

However, Automation Heroes can't go it alone; they need extra firepower to drive forward these automate-everything initiatives whilst continuously delivering the benefits of:

• improved reliability
• reduced developer toil
• optimised costs. 

In other words, every Automation Hero needs trusty sidekicks. These sidekicks are... Superautomation and Everything-as-Code.

Superautomation

In complex, distributed tech ecosystems, sometimes simple automation isn't enough. 

Whilst it's important to get the basics right, Superautomation is an essential step if you want to have a more comprehensive and cohesive approach. 

Superautomation is a bit like orchestration; it is a layer above your ecosystem, cohesively and intelligently conducting your tools, platforms and initiatives.

Superautomation is delivered by platform-based solutions which can enable everything-as-code capabilities. Because once it's expressed as code, it can be automated.

Everything-as-Code

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), through tools like Terraform, has become the defacto way to deploy infrastructure in a declarative way, whilst introducing aspects of automation.

IaC can be considered a foundation for automation, but it doesn’t deliver holistic automation on its own. IaC, by it’s very nature, can only be applied to infrastructure and not the services which run on top of it or the policies and runbooks which manage those services.

In fact, over 70% of unstructured automation initiatives fail, with just 21% reporting success in their automation initiatives. To success, you need to enable the structured automation offered by Everything-as-Code. 

Everything-as-Code advances automation to orchestration (or SuperAutomation), enabling declarative environments and collaboration at scale; including the codification of policy, governance, compliance, runbooks and more, as well as applications, infrastructure and core services. 

By codifying the environment, you are able to add automation throughout, creating new efficiencies, reducing toil and improving reliability. 

Become an Automation Hero

Learn more about Superautomation and Everything-as-Code. Plus, assess your maturity on our Automation Maturity model when you download your copy of How To Be An Automation Hero: