In this blog series we explored a handful of today’s most pressing automation topics. Of course, there are many other areas across enterprises where automation is driving profound change, like IT operations, the Internet of Thing (IoT), data analytics, business resilience, governance, and compliance. We focused on defining the three levels of automation (i.e., low-level automation, orchestration, enterprise automation), then dug into four of the most dynamic automation arenas we see across our customers today.
Craig Bucheli, who heads up EVOTEK’s Data Center Practice, explained how a spectrum of automation solutions are being leveraged in the data center to provide IT customers with the on-demand self-provisioning services available in the hyperscalers. Many organizations are starting their automation journey by implementing low-level task automations, orchestrating these into larger workflows and presenting these to users in a service catalog.
Matt Shufeldt of EVOTEK’s Digital Platform Practice, showed us how the CI/CD pipeline is being automated to eliminate the tedious manual tasks and increase deployment speed, quality, and consistency. To do this, many DevOps organizations are starting by automating complicated, frequent, and time-consuming processes. Some are leveraging a recent issue or incident as the impetus to automate manual but critical processes. Other teams are taking a proactive, top-down automation approach to orchestrate new business processes from inception.
Matt Stamper from EVOTEK’s Security Practice explored the dire effects of growing distractions in the security space, and how this building waves of noise is drowning out key signals. By automating mundane and error-prone tasks such as configuration validation, log trolling, and event reviews seeking indicators of compromise, security experts are freed to explore higher value security surveillance. Since the bad guys are using automated attacks, today’s security organizations must automate their response so that breaches, vulnerabilities, and compromises are detected and mitigated at network speed.
Tyler Teschon and Heather Maitre, thought leaders in EVOTEK’s Intelligent Automation Practice, helped us explore the emerging field of hyperautomation—the automation of automation. By taking a much broader approach than just low-level task automation, hyperautomation encompasses automation prep, process mining, robotic process automation (RPA), workflow automation, and automated script generation. We were also warned that tomorrow’s enterprises will be hyperautomated or hyper-behind.
New technologies, products, and services are being released weekly—adding to the groundswell of automation solutions available to evolving enterprises. Wherever your starting point is, EVOTEK would like to join you on your automation journey—give us a shout.
Join us next quarter when we tackle another trend affecting today’s IT leaders.
