Uses of IT Process Automation

• Disaster recovery. IT Process Automation can be used to proactively prevent or recover from a disaster. Most large organizations have a business continuity plan which can be invoked manually in case of an emergency. This process normally consists of a large group of employees from all across the business coming together to agree that a disaster has occurred and that the recovery plan should be invoked. This is a very time consuming and costly endeavor which can mean significantly prolonged recovery times for your services or business. Applying automation to this problem means that the tests that would previously have to be manually run by multiple departments to establish a disaster had occurred can be automatically run and results centralized. The authorization or departmental sign off process can also be automated before the recovery process is initiated. The result is a thoroughly tested and authorized declaration or a disaster and recovery that can be implemented many times faster than if done manually. Automation also reduces the time and cost incurred periodically testing disaster recovery procedures as well as mitigating the risks involved in what is now a mandatory activity for most organizations.
• Fault remediation. Today, most mature IT organizations have a monitoring and event management solution managing their IT infrastructure which reports any faults or impacts to the IT Operations department. What normally happens today is that the operators investigate the events and try and discover the underlying problem and then restore service. This process can involve running tests (e.g. check a process is running, test network connectivity etc), and then based on the results, trying to fix the problem and ultimately escalating to a domain expert if everything else fails. Any kind of service outage or degradation can be very costly to a business so remediating problems quickly is extremely important. IT process automation can react to the events from the monitoring system and automate the tasks that the operators previously manually performed in order to diagnose and restore service at machine speed, or, if it is unable to do so escalate the event to a domain expert or incident management system. The end result is improved service levels and a reduced time to repair.
• IT Resource Provisioning and Life Cycle Management. Provisioning and lifecycle management of IT resources can be a costly and time consuming process. Large IT organizations often lose control of their data centre, not understanding who owns resources, what they are used, for, whether they are still needed or not etc. Automating the provisioning and then managing the lifecycle of IT resources can provide many benefits. Automating this process can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to acquire and build a new asset and by automating pre and post build tasks and handling authorizations you can ensure that assets are built accurately, securely and are compliant with company policy, all within a matter of minutes. Having detail and visibility of the deployed assets means that control can be returned to the IT department and that servers or assets that are no longer used can be returned to a resource pool and reused, thus saving both the capital expenditure and the operational expense of managing that asset going forward.
• ITIL Service Support Processes. With the growing worldwide adoption of ITIL, many organizations have standardized processes in support of ITIL guidelines. In particular, the Service Support processes such as incident and problem management and change and configuration management have been well defined and automation is the next step on the maturity curve. Automation can be leveraged to provide the linkage between processes as well, for example when a fault occurs with some IT resource, an incident can be generated and a change request can be made at the same time to resolve the problem. Automation drives efficiency and integration and improves accountability and compliance.

See our Case Studies section for examples of how IT Process Automation has benefited our customers.