Partner Content: ‘The time saving is massive’ - Why you need to automate your enterprise stack, end to end

Enterprise automation goes beyond a single team or project to bring the sum of the parts together

“Automation” is the latest tech buzzword, but how does it actually apply to the enterprise IT estate? It goes beyond scripting repetitive tasks: it’s about building resilient, scalable systems that can adapt to issues in real-time – and even heal themselves.

To do that, automation need to be rolled out across, and present throughout, your IT infrastructure, hence why this specific use case is known as enterprise IT automation.

In a recent LinkedIn Live by solutions and systems integrator Insight, Computing editor Tom Allen sat down with Aidan Beeson, enterprise automation specialist at Red Hat, and Lee Wilkinson from the EMEA CTO Office at Insight, to talk about the new business case for automation – one that goes beyond saving time or headcount.

“Normal IT automation is when you’re a group, an individual, you’re trying to get something done and you think the best thing to do is automate that task – because it’s difficult or repetitive and you want to get consistency on it,” explains Aidan.

“Enterprise automation is maturing that into a difference space, where essentially it’s not just a single person or a single team... It’s trying to get that end-to-end automation we all need nowadays in the IT space to automate everything from full deliveries to issue remediation to all sorts of complex tasks that involve lots of different people within the organisation.”

Lee adds, “I’d liken it to enterprise architecture. You’ve got individual practices and domains and specialism... Enterprise automation is not just automating one of those pieces, it’s bringing the sum of those parts together.”

The average firm has anywhere from 10 up to “hundreds” of automation tools, and each has at least one management element like a console. An orchestration layer, says Lee, is crucial.

“Take public cloud as an example. You’ve got homegrown tools to automate in Azure [like] Bicep and PowerShell. You've got the ability to do that in Google Cloud, you've got the ability to do that in AWS, you've got the ability to run automation in individual on-prem solutions, usually baked into the platform; but nothing really ties all of it together... Most applications are built up of individual pieces and you have to orchestrate those individual bits, and that takes a lot of time and effort.

“The time saving if you can get that right, for common use cases, is massive.”

The panel went on to discuss the challenges in rolling enterprise automation out across the business – where culture plays a large part – and the best way to approach such a transformation: should it come from top down or bottom up?

They also discuss how to secure funding for automation projects from business stakeholders who hold the purse strings (show how you can save them money!), and how to address the security holes automation can (but doesn’t have to) open up.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

This Article is sponsored by Insight