Give your automation teams a platform
Walk into today’s IT department and what you see most are people. I have seen IT departments thats more than 20% of the total staff allocated to IT. As more systems and processes are required, IT just hires more. But with new technologies comes new complexities of training, preparing, setting up the processes, building support channels and building development. This is why when you want your IT to deploy or accept something new, it takes them a couple of years.
With the years, IT has moved from intranet connected applications, to internet connected applications and from there onward and upward to softwares delivered as a service and now all of the above from the cloud, be it public, private or hybrid.
Complexity of not only deploying, but also maintaining and supporting these systems have increased and most companies are now looking at “Total Outsourcing Contracts” to deal with this. This has resulted in loss of control, dropping of SLAs and general loss in competitiveness in IT. Since these deals are penned for a minimum three years, any hope of trying to bring change to the organisation has a minimum three years lead time. Your IT has now officially become a stagnant high-inertia organisation that gives the rest of the organisation a service catalogue that is tough to add to.
Automation teams in IT
For a few years now, automation has been seen as the key to unlocking this knot. IT organisations in competitive industries, especially in finance and technology space, are setting up automation teams within their IT. These teams look at different IT processes and explore opportunities to automate different aspects of it. The main focus of this is to reduce manual errors, improve speed of execution, improve SLA adherence and enhance rate of change, thus making IT more nimble, agile and ready to scale.
There are different types of tools in the market under the automation umbrella.
Monitors: Monitors are those automation tools that primarily monitors different applications or servers and collect usage data on them. Programs can be written to handle alerts raised by these monitors. These programs can then be executed when an alert is raised and thus automating the error-fix cycle. The data collected by these monitors can be used further to take pre-emptive actions through scheduled programs to prevent initial alerts. E.g. The monitor data shows that every time the disk is 90% full, a particular application fails to start. We write a program that automatically clears space on the disk every time the disk is 80% full, such that there never reaches a condition when the particular application fails to start.
Service Desk Automations: These are tools that primarily provides a IT Service management tool. The tool is a platform for ticketing and tracking requests from users within an organisation. The system can store data on recurring issues and can provide out of the box solutions to fix specific types of issues. Automation capabilities of current tools in this space are limited. E.g. A typical ticket raised in an organisation is “I forgot my Windows password. Please reset.”. The system can be setup to automatically dequeue a ticket logged here, reset the corresponding password and subsequently close the ticket. As you can see the SLA adherence for password resets just hit 100%.
Orchestrators: Orchestrators pin together various tasks that needs to be executed and performs them at pre-defined time. These can span over multiple servers. Orchestrators work with Monitors and service desk tools. Processes can be converted into a flow diagram of tasks. Typical examples of orchestrator related tasks are End of Day (EOD) activities on an application servers which includes, backing up database, shutting down database, shutting down application, shutting down both servers, taking disk backup of both servers and then bringing both back up.
Current automation tools market is hardly complete. Automation tools that were available in the market so far cover needs only partially. IT now has to fork out for different tools for different automation capabilities. This has led to much lower rates of adoption than what is currently needed. Some of the negative aspects we have seen in tools in the market are:
- Need to install agents. If you have to automate a machine, you need to install a third party agent on that machine.
- No good, intuitive user interface to design a workflow.
- Writing workflow often requires professional services from the provider.
- Fragmented and hence buying more tools ultimately increase your total cost of ownership
Foundations of an IT Process Automation tool
Gartner’s recently published “Know IT process automation” claims that all IT Process Automation(ITPA) tools are composed of three main functions:
- A workflow “designer” provides a mechanism to document the process workflow. Vendors provide templates of “canned” workflows.
- The automation engine is the heart of the tool.
- A framework or API enables integration with other tools, visualisations, dashboards, monitoring, debugging and reporting on workflow execution or other performance metrics.
Apart from the above, a good ITPA tool should give you an agent-less architecture with an intuitive user interface and a workflow system that can be mastered quickly so that your automation team can be productive with the platform within weeks. Ability to integrate with different systems from different providers are very important.
One very important aspect to consider for while buying an ITPA tools is not to go for a vendor specific platform. There are quite a few tools out there that work well with other applications of the same vendor, but are quite rough when dealing with other platforms. This will create vendor lock-ins where you will lose the freedom to switch not only the automation platform, but also all the other tools in your ecosystem.
What your automation teams need are construction kits. each comes with different sizes and shapes building materials to build out the specific design. This building material can be thought of as the content and prebuilt scripts that orchestrate various automation scenarios (for example, provisioning, fault and event recovery, cloud automation). While understanding the type and diversity of the content that the tools come with is important, it is imperative to understand that there will still be a requirement to customise it to meet your specific environment requirements. In the end you will need to customise to your needs, processes and ecosystem, hence your ITPA tool has to be general purpose tool which can integrate with a wide range of systems.
Automation teams within IT is what will drive the agility, speed of execution, scalability and ultimately the competitiveness of your IT and your organisation. They'll need a platform be able to deliver that.