Today’s enterprises rely heavily on IT infrastructure to accelerate digital transformation, which, in turn, supports innovation and boosts productivity. Businesses must deliver a robust digital experience across the board to remain competitive. As a result, many organisations are adopting DevOps principles to ensure their operations run as efficiently as possible.
This article explores the benefits of infrastructure automation that make it inevitable for almost all enterprises.
Why Automate Infrastructure?
Organisations are automating infrastructure in droves because of the many benefits it provides. Automating infrastructure:
Improves reliability: Automation ensures your infrastructure is consistently configured and deployed in a stable and reliable way.
Increases efficiency: Automating tasks and processes reduces the amount of time and effort required to manage IT infrastructure, allowing you to focus on other areas of the business, such as launching new products and services.
Reduces risk: Automation reduces the risk of human error, which commonly causes outages and other serious problems. The Uptime Institute estimates that human error plays a role in around two-thirds of all outages—removing humans from the mix will allow organisations to reduce downtime significantly.
Provides better scalability: IT automation makes it easier to scale your infrastructure up (or sometimes down) as needed, allowing you to easily add or remove resources to meet changing operational demands.
The Issue of the Infrastructure Automation Skills Gap
Another issue facing organisations is the automation skills gap. Many enterprises are struggling to recruit the necessary talent to implement automation strategies, creating a barrier to the adoption of emerging technologies. Gartner found that infrastructure and operations teams are facing gaps on two fronts: a technical skills gap and a cultural gap that limits the organisation’s ability to maximise the full potential of automated infrastructure.
Skills
With competition intensifying, organisations are keen to hire talent to implement complex software stacks spanning cloud infrastructure and services and containerised infrastructure. Doing this allows software teams to create new, innovative products and services faster than ever before.
However, organisations struggle to find people with the skills to create and deliver these complex environments that teams desperately need to stay competitive. One survey found that 85 per cent of organisations faced barriers to embracing a DevOps approach, and the most common barrier was a lack of employee skills. But without the right talent, how can enterprises automate infrastructure?
The Solution: Effective Training
Sometimes the solution is training rather than hiring new people. By training your engineers in infrastructure automation tools, you unlock a huge amount of potential for your organisation. Evolvere conducts regular training sessions in a range of areas:
Python for Network Engineers
Beginners Ansible for Network Engineers
Advanced Ansible for Network Engineers
Kubernetes by Example
To learn more about our training sessions, click here.
Culture
A skills gap isn’t the only barrier that prevents organisations from automating infrastructure. Failure to embrace emerging technologies because of a stagnant culture has serious implications for businesses. For example, a report by Deloitte found that the average IT department devoted over 50 per cent of its budget to systems maintenance, whereas only 19 per cent was allocated to innovation.
But what does ‘innovation’ typically involve? Usually, it involves automation tools. To increase the speed of delivery and reduce costs, forward-thinking organisations employ infrastructure automation tools, such as Ansible and Terraform. But these tools cannot even start to be considered by organisations without a culture shift that fully embraces digital transformation.
The Solution: A Helping Hand
For some organisations, training staff to manage the infrastructure automation process might not be suitable. If your organisation prefers more of a hands-off approach, we’ve got the solution. The Evolvere team can install the infrastructure automation tools you need for a fixed cost, allowing you to fast-track your digital transformation efforts. Additionally, establishing the skills and experience required to run modern, automated infrastructure takes time. That’s why we can run defined sections of your infrastructure for you for a fixed duration and cost, just until you’ve had the chance to train or hire the individuals you need to manage systems.
The Scale of the Problem
Enterprise IT is developed over many years, and the complexity of systems tend to increase with each new addition. Legacy systems can’t be upgraded overnight; it happens over time. Many enterprises have already implemented some automation, but it is usually fragmented and isolated in separate departments.
The Solution: Hire a Team With Plenty of Experience
With years of experience managing legacy systems in demanding environments, we can determine realistic outcomes and produce a programme of work to automate your infrastructure. In addition, we can integrate existing automation teams and provide training and support to build the skills necessary to run automation systems. With our help, you can progress the automation process according to priority.
If you’d like to discuss your infrastructure automation requirements in more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact us.