Automation—The Key to Success in Today’s Digital World
I started my IT technology career 35 years ago as a VMS system administrator and had one guiding principle that probably carried over from my engineering background; if I had to do anything a second time, it meant that I missed the opportunity to automate it the first time.
This philosophy of automating everything is no longer just a best practice and a nice-to-have; this is a mandatory practice if you want to remain viable and succeed in today’s data driven digital world.
Data Growth is Exploding
As enterprises continue to transform from being partially or even fully analog to being fully digital, the pace at which data is being generated is increasing at an astonishing rate.
The ability to manually scan for issues in the myriad of log files and data flows is no longer feasible. This vast increase in data generation is happening everywhere, whether generated from an endpoint, an IoT device, assets being run on the edge, in the cloud, on-prem, in a private cloud, or in a co-lo.
More Data Means More Knowledge
The upside of having a large set of data is that it gives you the ability to glean more information from the wealth of detailed data being generated.
Having additional information available for analysis provides more opportunities to correlate this data which means generating more knowledge.
As this data volume grew across disparate locations , the ability to analyze the data became more complex.
Finding the Needle in the Haystack
Data and log aggregation and notification tools rose to fill the gap so that one could identify and provide insight and alerts of issues found within all this data.
Efficient identification and generation of alerts was a big step forward, however blindly issuing an alert if there’s nobody actively monitoring the alerting mechanism doesn’t help.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound?
What To Do When You Find the Needle—Automation to the Rescue!
Automation is the key to being able to take appropriate action to mitigate an issue as soon as it appears. Whether it’s the identification of the latest development check-in that broke the build, or an indication of malware that’s beginning a ransomware attack, immediate remediation actions are necessary. Waiting for a human to respond is not an option.
There are too many “critical” notifications in the digital operations world today that only get worse as remediation is delayed. The examples above cover a couple of key areas, however automation can really be applied across the board, and in fact is necessary in today’s digital world to respond to any incidents.
Bottom Line
Automation of IT and business processes are key to the design of an efficient Digital Operations platform, and technology and business leaders – whether line managers or members of the C- suite – need to keep automation at the forefront of their architectural decisions.
This blog is a part of the Digital Operations blog series by Aragon Research’s Sr. Director of Research, Craig Kennedy.
Missed an installment? Catch up here!
Blog 1: Introducing the Digital Operations Blog Series
Blog 2: Digital Operations: Keeping Your Infrastructure Secure
Blog 3: Digital Operations: Cloud Computing
Blog 4: Cybersecurity Attacks Have Been Silently Escalating
Employee Engagement and the New Way of Work
The pandemic taught every enterprise a big lesson–work from anywhere is real and so is the need to engage with employees. The era of Talent Management is over. The new focus is employees and engagement.
On Wednesday, October 26, join Aragon CEO and lead analyst, Jim Lundy, to discuss this new focus on Employee Engagement and the technologies worth leveraging to keep people engaged.
Key topics include:
- Trends driving the shift to Employee Engagement
- What are the technologies and methodologies to enable better ways to get work done and also engage employees?
- How can enterprises gain a competitive advantage by focusing on Employee Engagement?