Automate your ITOps intelligently to beat out competitors CA says

Friday, May 11, 2018

Automating time-consuming tasks in IT Operations more intelligently can give you an edge over the competition because it makes managing data easier, and frees up time to work smarter in other areas of DevOps. CA's Gwyn Clay weighs in.

Automation and IT are joined at the hip. From backing up servers to parsing log files and alerting, automation is a staple in the daily routine of IT operations and DevOps.

But IT infrastructures have changed considerably since the early days of IT operation centers, so automated processes need to grow and adapt too, and become more intelligent, to maintain a high level of integrity.

CA Automation’s Gwyn Clay offers some insight on the subject of “intelligent automation” for ITOps and shares a few tips that can make a difference to anyone who views automation as a painful idea.

ADM: What does CA Automic mean when it says intelligent automation?

Clay: Most organizations today dedicate a significant share of their budgets to automate repeatable tasks and routine processes, particularly within IT Operations. What we are talking about are automation tools used to execute manual, easily defined processes. As automation systems become more “intelligent”, they are able to undertake more complex tasks, applying better awareness and understanding of the underlying business context.

ADM: Why is this beneficial to ITOps?

Clay: Traditional automation tools identify "business events" as a static series, either by a timed schedule or recurrent polling. Intelligent automation overcomes this limitation by enabling event flow correlation to trigger or control automation activity, thus dramatically reducing latency in business workflows and guaranteeing information delivery and integrity.

ADM: How has digital transformation impacted ITOps?

Clay: IT Operations are now at the forefront, they need to rapidly evolve from keeping the lights on, to continue driving innovation through the effective use of technology.

ADM: What challenges does ITOps face in a digital world?

Clay: The main challenge for IT Operations that I see is to increase their agility with minimal disruption on existing processes, in order to meet business demand and seize future opportunities quickly. If IT Operations cannot meet time to market objectives, the business will look for alternatives, increasing shadow IT.

ADM: Why is automation a pain point for them?

Clay: Automation has oﬀered a degree of flexibility to traditional IT Operations for years. They have opportunistically used ad hoc, point solutions such as job scheduling or custom scripts to streamline and improve the speed of operations. Today, application stacks of different ages have multiple virtualization layers; private and public cloud solutions must all be aggregated in order to deliver a single IT service. Lack of centralized process automation has resulted in polluting end-to-end visibility and makes flexibility unattainable.

ADM: What sort of things should ITOps have 'intelligently automated' and how can they do this?

Clay: Infrastructure should be highly automated to empower IT Operations within DevOps. Providing self-service capabilities to development teams enables developers to focus on innovation and coding, rather than time-consuming operational tasks.

Workloads should be efficiently brokered across on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments from a single automation and decision point rather than an array of opportunistic tools.

ADM: Is there anything else you think the ITOps world should know about automation and the digital transformation?

Clay: Adding intelligence to automation will usher in a new era for productivity and innovation, setting new standards of speed and agility for IT Operations. Companies that successfully implement intelligent automation will surpass competitors that do not - yet another side effect of Digital Darwinism.

About Gwyn Clay

Gwyn Clay is CA Automations Vice President of Product Management. An execution-focused expert in IT Automation solutions, Gwyn possesses a blend of analytical thinking, business knowledge, technical knowledge, and project leadership skills.