infoTECH Feature

April 22, 2015

5 Things Enterprises Didn't Know They Could Automate

By TMCnet Special Guest
Jim Manias , Vice President at Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc.

IT automation isn’t new, but it’s found its way into some of the most innovative aspects of computing today. Beyond managing repetitive tasks such as job scheduling, automation can now streamline processes across the enterprise, leaving IT teams with more time and resources to focus on the big picture. Read on to see how you can automate these 5 IT processes:

Streamline DevOps Processes: Workload automation solutions streamline DevOps processes to facilitate collaboration and shorten application release cycles by providing pre-templated job steps and reference plans that minimize time spent scripting and performing repetitive processes. For example, users can create a single, complex workflow that can be reused numerous times in various environments such as Dev, QA, and Production, instead of creating multiple workflows, each requiring individual maintenance.

Onboard and Offboard Employees and Customers: Organizations can minimize the wait time of adding new customers into CRM systems by creating an automated process as soon as a new sale is made. Similarly, organizations can get employees up and running faster without having to rely on manual processes by using automation to onboard/offboard employees. 

Workload Balancing to Prevent SLA Breaches: Automation mitigates the risk of SLA breaches and critical deadline failures by providing built-in monitoring that warns users when jobs are taking longer than expected or are in danger of overrunning the allotted time. Once this warning occurs, automation software will change priority levels and build fences to re-direct downstream jobs as well as reconfigure downstream servers with additional resources, optimizing job success.

Automate Help Desk and Support Procedures: Organizations can utilize the built-in alerting capabilities of automation software to create Help Desk tickets when an object fails, thereby eliminating manual handoffs and reducing the time to resolution.

Improve Data and Analytics/Big Data: As businesses begin to introduce big data processes into their IT environments, orchestration is needed to ensure the process works from top to bottom. Big Data requires unstructured and structured data to be transferred through a file transfer application, stored in a data platform like Hadoop, and then extracted, transformed, and loaded through an ETL application until it is finally presented in user dashboards via a business intelligence platform. Since automation software already has built-in integrations to ETL tools, BI tools, file transfer applications, and more, it acts as the central hub for big data processing, allowing for reliable end-to-end workflow execution across multiple applications and technologies.

About the Author: Jim Manias is Vice President at Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. and is responsible for the overall market strategy and planning for a range of products including ActiveBatch® Workload Automation and Job Scheduling.  Jim has been with Advanced Systems Concepts since 1991 and has held multiple senior management positions in the enterprise software and hardware market.  Jim can be reached at [email protected]




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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