Five signs that you need data center automation

You’ve gone virtual. Virtualization adds a whole new layer of complexity to the IT environment and planning, configuration and management issues need to be top of mind before deployment. A comprehensive automation solution strategy that encompasses multi-vendor physical and virtual infrastructure and coordinates tasks across the silos during virtualization processes allows organisations to automatically provision the necessary resources to meet changing business demands.

You need to cut costs. Many organisations waste resources on complicated, labor-intensive processes that eat up manpower and are often riddled with errors. Automation solutions can replace these procedures with consistent, automated workflows that can save thousands in workflow costs and reduce the risk of error.

Your infrastructure is changing. The technology infrastructure for the average enterprise is constantly in flux. This continual charge of change runs the risk of service disruption due to error-prone, ad hoc changes. By automating the business service, an organization can keep pace with the rapid rate of change. Teams can see potential change conflicts before they are released and prioritize the changes, mitigating risk to the business service.

You’re under pressure to deliver more value to the business. The ability to bring new products to market faster and more efficiently is an enduring edge over the competition. Automating change across the data center is a key enabling factor driving enterprises to rapidly introduce new services, and consequently, greater value. Automation allows previously siloed teams to ensure that changes are coordinated and introduced into the environment in a repeatable fashion. Consequently, time and resources that were once spent on updating and maintaining systems can be diverted to higher value work and revenue generating initiatives.

Compliance takes up too much time. Compliance and security are two of the most reoccurring topics in discussions on today’s business environment. Organisations are under constant pressure to ensure the highest level of security for private information and confidential customer data. For the IT team, this means keeping servers, network, storage and client devices up-to-date with the latest security patches and configurations. Automation enables enterprises to automate these complex and time-consuming processes.

Kalyan Ramanathan
HP’s Business Service Automation group