Red Hat Ansible Automation

Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. Any industry that encounters repetitive tasks can use automation, but automation is more prevalent in the industries of manufacturing, robotics, and automotives, as well as in IT systems.

In today’s world of rapid technological change, the challenges organizations face—to support employees and partners, reach new customers, and provide innovative products and services—are more complex than ever before. IT plays a crucial role in meeting these demands, but also acts as a blocker if it isn’t scalable and can’t keep up with demand.

As enterprises scale, so does the difficulty of deploying and maintaining environments that are stable, more secure, and consistent. To break it down further:

• IT operations are resource-intensive—and maintaining legacy systems and processes at the same time as new ones only increases complexity.
• Requirements and demand are outgrowing IT and business capabilities.
• The scale of technology (virtualization, cloud, containers, etc.) is too great to do manually.

In this constantly shifting environment, automation has become a strategic imperative. Automation is critical to managing, changing, and adapting your IT infrastructure and the way your enterprise operates. IT teams can automate complex processes to increase efficiency, productivity, and flexibility—while also reducing costs and human error.

Automation is not meant to replace people—its purpose is to augment human capabilities. This is known as the paradox of automation: as you become efficient using automation, human involvement becomes more important but less frequent.

Some may see automation as a tool that eliminates jobs, but automation actually frees up existing IT staff to focus on larger challenges. By simplifying processes and reducing manual tasks, IT teams can improve efficiency and productivity—while also preserving resources to work toward strategic goals, such as improving customer satisfaction.

Automation can help enterprises achieve:

• Greater productivity. By automating mundane, repetitive tasks, a higher volume of tasks can be performed more quickly with less oversight, allowing IT staff to spend more time on value-adding projects.
• Better reliability. Decreasing the amount of human intervention also reduces the risk for errors and improves consistency. Automation ensures that steps are done the same way every time—so teams know exactly when processes, tests, updates, or workflows are going to happen, how long they’ll take, and whether they complete correctly.
• Easier governance. Relying on large teams of people to perform complex processes can easily lead to knowledge gaps and miscommunication, both within and between groups in an organization. Codifying knowledge in automation can help to ensure more controlled, consistent governance across teams and tasks.
• 24/7 operations. Since automation can execute tasks in the middle of the night without human intervention, businesses can automate remediation at any time, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimizing downtime.
• Better security. Automation can be used to identify, prevent, and respond more quickly—in a standardized way—to potential security threats across IT environments.

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Source: Red Hat, 15.12.2023