Earlier this year Virima sponsored a webinar on the ‘Business Value of Intelligent IT Automation’ This post summarizes some of the key points covered during that event, which is available on demand.
Your business relies on Information Technology. As your business evolves, so does its supporting IT estate, which makes it more complex and difficult to manage and secure. Disruptive technologies ranging from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the Internet of Things (IoT) are adding to the complexity and difficulty, even as they deliver benefits to IT and the business.
Basically, your IT team is now challenged to maximize the availability, flexibility, performance, and security of your IT estate as both it and the business grows and changes. All while minimizing costs and risks.
(See, “Is your CMDB a catalyst for IT evolution?”)
IT Management: Can It Be Manual?
As Robert Roberts, Director of IT Operations and Support at Segra, pointed out during the webinar, IT estates can be managed manually. However, in the face of rapid and significant growth and change, manual or poorly automated responses to demands and requests can quickly become inadequate.
Another challenge is the fact that manual processes that contribute to information that drives decisions about IT and business cannot scale sufficiently.
Trying to manage IT asset discovery or updates to your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with manual processes alone is like painting the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge. By the time you’ve finished one iteration, enough has changed that another round is needed.
Cybersecurity is another area where manual processes alone can quickly become inadequate, sometimes dangerously so. Many if not most of the successful, high-profile breaches of IT environments reported in the media exploit vulnerabilities for which patches have been available for months or years.
In a lot of those cases, the victimized company simply has not been able to keep software patches and updates current, in part or totally because of inadequate, manual processes.
Employing Intelligent IT Automation
Intelligent IT automation can enable you and your team to deliver the availability, flexibility, performance, and security your business needs.
It reduces rather than increases strain and pressure on your team and available resources and helps in a number of key areas. Here are some discussed during the webinar.
User Support
- New hardware, software, account, password and resource access requests
- Single sign-on management
- Password resets
- Ticketing and incident management, response, and escalation
System and Network Operations and Monitoring
- Provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts and licenses
- Software and hardware configuration changes, updates, and management
- Security scans and patch deployments
- Storage management
- File, folder, event log, and network monitoring (with appropriate notifications of changes)
- Monitoring of IT services (with restart as needed after a change or crash)
Updates and Reporting
- Report generation (on-schedule and on-demand)
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB) updates
Your business can doubtlessly benefit from applying intelligent IT automation to at least one of these areas, if not several of them.
So pick one to start, take carefully considered, measured steps toward your goal, and document everything you learn. Then, use that first experience to map out your next efforts to bring intelligent IT automation to your entire IT environment.
Virima: Your IT Automation Expert
Virima’s solutions for IT Asset Management (ITAM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) can help your business succeed with intelligent IT automation. They are easy to use and configure, and designed to work well with each other. They also produce useful, actionable reports about your IT environment, for IT managers and business decision makers.
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
