The Business Value Of Automation

Red Hat’s management strategy director Massimo Ferrari explores why automating processes within the enterprise can bring stability and smoothness to the CIO.

Many enterprises in the Middle East 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 skill sets 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’s a business choice. Without automation, supporting the growth of your business can be increasingly complex, to the point of becoming impossible beyond a certain scale. If it’s true that software is eating the world, as the well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said in 2011, and if it’s true that every company is becoming a technology company, as the chief of research at Gartner said in 2013, then automation becomes a must-have tool in the hands of the business, not just of the IT organisation.

Less waste: automation optimises IT operations

Highways are a good analogy for this. When the population in a geographical area grows, the government is forced to develop the infrastructure to support the additional cars. In some places, these highways must be equipped with toll gateways to regulate access, and toll gateways must be operated by humans, each performing thousands of repetitive operations per day. In turn, the newly built highways attract even more citizens in the region, and more cars on the road. The government can deal with the spike in traffic either by adding more gateways and hiring new people to manage them, or it can make the existing highways more efficient by implementing automated barriers and automated access systems.