Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 11 | Page 46

INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE BUSINESS Enterprises can solve complexity by automation Using vehicle and road analogies, Massimo Ferrari at Red Hat explains how automation can drive four key benefits in sprawling enterprises. M any enterprises have now reached a stage where managing the scale of their IT infrastructures is becoming a challenge second only to increasing the speed of provisioning. A broad spectrum of technologies, solutions, processes, and skillsets is available to help manage a large-scale environment. Among management technologies, automation is one of the most powerful. Automation is not merely a technology choice. First and foremost, it is a business choice. Without automation, supporting the growth of your business can be increasingly complex, to the point of 46 becoming impossible beyond a certain scale. Here are four key reasons why automation is critical to managing a large- scale IT environment: Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Less waste Less complexity Less mistakes Less uncertainty Less waste IT automation can help your operations team to manage more workloads over the same working hours, reducing the need to hire more staff to support the growth of the infrastructure. Less complexity In an enterprise environment, this dynamic implies that some of the Lines of Business that you are serving may eventually start requesting services that are outside the planned offering or far more complex than what originally anticipated. Like the automatic transmission in your car, an automation tool is designed to deal with a large number of moving parts at the same time, taking care of repetitive tasks and keeping all the pieces together while delivering predictable results. Automation tools can simplify your experience of deploying and maintaining Issue 11 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS