What Is IT Automation?

IT automation, sometimes called infrastructure automation, is the use of software to create repeatable instructions and processes that replace or reduce human interaction with IT systems. Automation software works within the confines of those instructions, tools and frameworks to carry out tasks with little or no human intervention. Automation is key to IT optimization and digital transformation. Modern, dynamic IT environments need to scale faster than ever, and IT automation is vital to making that happen.

What Does IT Automation Include?

In theory, if it’s an IT task, some degree of automation can be applied to it. Automation can therefore integrate with — and be applied to — everything from network automation to infrastructure, cloud provisioning and standard operating environments (SOEs), all the way to application deployment and configuration management.

Automation capabilities and practices can be extended to specific technologies such as containers, to methodologies such as DevOps, and to broader areas such as cloud, edge computing, security, testing and monitoring/alerting. A holistic approach to IT automation can help you take repetitive, manual processes off your staff’s hands. This lets teams be more productive, reduce errors, improve collaboration and free up time for more meaningful, thoughtful work.

Provisioning

You need infrastructure to run your business systems, and that infrastructure has to be set up. What used to be about racks, boxes and cables in a data center is now (mostly) about virtualized assets — from software-defined data centers, networks and storage to virtual machines and containers.

Much of what we do today is defined in software, and the shift to software has increased the scale and capacity of what is possible. This shift also enables — and in fact requires — processes to be codified. That helps you meet your business’s demands under growing cost awareness and time constraints. This is where automation comes in.

Why spend time setting up these environments manually from templates? Thanks to codification, you already have a template you follow to do this work. Why not let an automated system follow those rules instead?

Carry out deployments in your data center with automation that works with your existing infrastructure and management tools, making full use of what you already have to reach the future state you need.

Configuration Management

Not all applications are created equal. They require different settings, file systems, ports and users.

Once you have automated basic provisioning, you need to be able to tell those resources what to do. Keeping a record of what your application environment looks like in a document, spreadsheet, text file or even an email won’t give you a repeatable, robust environment to host your applications. And as you add more systems, more instances and more complexity, you need a better way of recording what your systems look like so you can manage them effectively. For this, you need a powerful configuration management solution that lets developers define infrastructure — bare metal, virtualized, cloud, containers and so on — in a way that anyone on your IT team can easily understand.

The simpler it is to automate ad hoc scripts and practices for system administration, the easier it becomes to get the real work done.

Orchestration

Chances are you are not deploying a single service on a single machine. Your IT is probably a bit more complex than that: it requires managing and serving multiple applications across multiple data centers and infrastructures.

You also have public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. The more complex an IT system is, the more complex managing all its moving parts can become, and the greater the need to combine multiple automated tasks and their configurations across groups of systems or machines. That, in short, is orchestration. Beyond that, you can control these orchestrations with robust automation solutions — letting you keep track of everything, tie it all together and easily run more advanced, autonomous systems.

Application Deployment

Whether you use a more traditional approach to application deployment or continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), development pipelines rely on robust, automated systems to meet modern expectations. Successful application deployment depends on a fully efficient set of automated, fundamental tasks and capabilities — especially in the testing phase.