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The average data center supports an increasingly complex environment, running a heterogeneous
mix of around 300 Windows, UNIX, Linux, i5/OS, and z/OS servers – and growing by an average of 30% per year.
In addition, IT is moving beyond being a tactical cost center to being a strategic asset, providing business services – not just technology – with 60% of enterprises adopting best practices like ITIL and ITSM to align IT with business needs.
IT must therefore adopt new approaches that cross traditional silos such as platforms, systems, business units, and IT departments, with processes and technologies to advance their operational maturity.
This EMA White Paper will investigate these issues in more depth, and provide advice on how to achieve these outcomes with IT Process Automation solutions such as CA IT Process Manager.
Dealing with Manual IT Processes
IT must manage complex IT processes every day – systematic workflows comprising a series of discrete yet interdependent tasks, involving multiple people, systems, technologies,
and departments. This is contrasted to simple IT tasks – which are completed quickly by one person, in a single system, within a single department.
Take, for example, provisioning for a new employee. A business unit manager must request
provisioning in the service desk. A service desk employee must assign the request. An HR manager must define the employee’s role in the HR system. A security administrator
must add them to the directory service. Application administrators must check license availability and add them to the appropriate application servers. Desktop administrators must check on licenses and configuration standards, prepare a new desktop, and install the appropriate client software. A network administrator must update firewalls, VPNs, routers, and other network services to ensure access to the network. At various stages, change requests must be logged, reviewed, and approved.
As a manual process, this can take days or weeks; and a single error can disrupt the entire process. Forgetting an action, missing a notification, a misconfigured deployment, and many other missteps can lead to significant delays, causing downtime, security and compliance risks, delayed or lost revenue, and more – clearly a fundamental problem for IT, and for the business.
Automating IT Processes
Fortunately, there is a solution – automating the entire process with IT Process Automation (ITPA) software.
As soon as the business manager submits a provisioning request, ITPA software – in conjunction with existing IT management tools – can query the HR system to determine the employee’s role, add them into the directory system, check license availability, update the application servers, deploy client-side software, and configure the appropriate network
devices – all according to predefined policies, and with no manual intervention. At each step, it can automatically add change requests and wait for approvals if required. If any step fails to complete for any reason, then it notifies the right people to fix the problem quickly – or just fixes the problem automatically.
No steps are forgotten. No policies are broken. No manual errors creep in. No delays go unnoticed. With faster response at each step, and almost no chance for human error, the new employee is up and running in minutes, instead of days or weeks, and valuable IT resources can engage in more strategic activities, saving time and money.
IT Process Automation quickly automates and coordinates IT management tools across complex, multi-disciplinary IT management workflows, such as new employee provisioning,
common problem resolution, new business system requests, approving and managing security changes, application data extract/transform/load (ETL) operations, and more.
Measurable Benefits from ITPA
EMA research into Data Center Automation (DCA) shows that ITPA results in substantial
benefits. Examining the benefits experienced by enterprises that have deployed one or more of 15 different DCA technologies, and comparing sites that have deployed ITPA with sites that have not, EMA found the following results:
ITPA and Higher Availability
Enterprises with ITPA report a faster average Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), and a higher average availability than sites without it, resulting in over 64 hours per year of additional uptime for a 24x7 data center. ITPA can automatically detect routine problems and respond to them instantly with policy-based remediation, leading to these faster repair
times and higher availability. It also reduces the downtime caused by human errors – in fact, EMA research shows that automation tools effectively reduce human errors at almost 60% of sites with ITPA, compared with only 45% of sites without it.
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