In a recent study, 88% of companies around the world said that automation would play a significant role in business priorities. Although there was less enthusiasm in the US (82%), automation appears to be a firm fixture of the data center of tomorrow.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the top five benefits are:

1. Greater Efficiency
2. Improving Service Level Availability
3. Deliver IT services based on priorities
4. Higher Availability
5. Reduction of Human Error

This all very well and good but where do you get started? How do you go about automating your own operations?

As always the first step is planning. To start, list all repeatable processes your company has such as sending out invoices, patching servers, server provisioning, etc.

When you have this list completed prioritize the list. You should also look at software and hardware packages that can automate the items on the list and can automate perhaps other processes.

The next step is to test each software and hardware package to see which ones fit best with your company. Take ease of installing, maintaining, and learning into account.

While this is going on you will need to come up with a means to effectively measure and test the automated processes. Maintenance and improvement should be priorities.

Continue to find things that can be automated and for each automated process develop testing measures. It is not enough to automate processes, automation needs to make sense for the company. What will it cost? How much time will it save? Can there be a purely objective means of testing the effectiveness of the automation and can you track these benefits?

Automation is the means to decrease overhead and allow your employees to be more productive. However, you always need to way the costs and be prepared to spend time learning and optimizing your automated processes. Automation is not some magic wand. Until next time Happy Hosting!