SPOTLIGHT
IT Process Automation
Your Key to Unleashing Operational Efficiency and Organizational Productivity
What is ITPA?
IT Process Automation (ITPA) refers to automating IT-centric processes such as incident response, service request fulfillment, and infrastructure updates.
Only when a process is automated can an organization strategically transform. ITPA, by performing end-to-end automation, eliminates delays, streamlines hand-offs, and delivers service excellence, governed by an overarching playbook.
Concurrently, ITPA stitches together a combination of individual actions and administrative tasks.
ITPA standardizes your existing automations while building out new workflows and runbooks. Efficient process workflows enable IT teams to respond faster, reduce the impact of incidents, as well as consistently maintain and deliver on their service level agreements (SLAs).
Who Can Benefit from ITPA?
- Network Professionals/ NOC Engineers
- IT Operations
- IT Service Management
- Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
- Monitoring & Observability Teams
- AIOps
IT process automation can help drive business outcomes around digital transformation through network automation. Using automation, Network Professionals can:
- Increase collaboration with their ITSM counterparts through streamlined workflows for incident response
- Orchestrate all of their existing tactical automations to drive higher governance and auditability for existing scripts
- Improve response times with automated diagnostic collection and remediation
- Drive standardization across all existing tools and practices with one platform to automate and orchestrate
- Optimize existing processes with automation, capture productivity gains, and scale and improve cycle times
Top Automation Use Cases
- Provisioning and configuration
- Incident diagnostics and remediation
- Proactive network testing
Embracing automation and event-driven workflows can help IT Operations teams tame growing complexity in the IT environment. With the growing use of tools and applications across all of IT, ITPA becomes the key to unleashing operational efficiency. IT Operations teams can do the following with ITPA:
- Increase collaboration through streamlined workflows for incident response and remediation
- Orchestrate automations to drive process optimization
- Decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR) through faster incident response driven by automated diagnostics and remediation
- Capture productivity gains, scale, and improve cycle times
Top Automation Use Cases
- Event-triggered auto-remediation, for example service/server restarts and disk space cleanup
- Failover [Load Balancer, Application]
- Backups and snapshots, for example: offsite backups, database backups, rolling nightly snapshots
Speed of delivery is crucial to ITSM practices. Manual service management practices–or in other words, ticket routing and fulfillment–cannot scale and meet the current demands of the business, both in terms of service delivery experience and speed. ITPA can help ITSM teams to drive speed by:
- Increasing collaboration with subject matter experts (SMEs) through automated workflows to streamline handoffs
- Orchestrating SME-approved automations to drive optimization of processes across the entire incident lifecycle
- Doing more with the current resources with automation driving productivity gains
- Decreasing mean time to resolution (MTTR) through faster incident response driven by automated diagnostics and remediation
Top Automation Use Cases
- Access requests and active directory (AD) synchronization
- General service requests such as service and server restarts and application provisioning
- Onboarding of new employees
SRE teams have the difficult job of ensuring business continuity while increasing development velocity. Ensuring fast, efficient response to incidents requires automation. ITPA can augment the work of SRE teams by ensuring fast diagnosis to not only speed up response but also standardize it. ITPA can help SRE teams with:
- Increasing collaboration with subject matter experts (SME) through automated workflows to streamline handoffs
- Proactively ensuring application/service continuity through regular audits
- Standardizing incident response with approved workflows that get kicked off as soon as an incident occurs
- Reduce MTTR with faster remediation
Top Automation Use Cases
- Event-triggered auto-remediation, for example service/server restarts and disk space cleanup
- Proactive network and service health checks
The most important purpose of observability is to collect data. ITPA platforms are event driven and can therefore kick off automations as soon as an event occurs, along with filing an IT ticket. Observability teams benefit most from ITPA and use it to:
- Eliminate false positives by validating alerts that get kicked-off as soon as alerts are raised
- Run comprehensive diagnostics across all systems to enable faster root cause analysis
- Remediate some of the most commonly occurring incidents and provide guided resolutions for those that are high risk
- Build resilient, self-healing infrastructure through auto-remediation workflows
Top Automation Use Cases
- Event-triggered auto-remediation, for example service/server restarts and disk space cleanup
- Scheduled compliance checks for network and services
While AIOps has been effective in reducing alert noise, IT teams are still getting too many alerts to handle in a day. ITPA platforms are event driven and can therefore kick-off automations as soon as an event occurs, along with recording all the actions in an IT incident. To maximize your investment in AIOps, IT teams can use ITPA to:
- Eliminate false positives by validating alerts that get kicked off
- Run comprehensive diagnostics across all systems to enable faster root-cause analysis
- Remediate some of the most commonly occurring incidents and provide guided resolutions for those that are high risk
- Build resilient, self-healing infrastructure through auto-remediation workflows
Top Automation Use Cases
- Self-healing of IT infrastructure
- Eventtriggered auto-remediation for example service/ server restarts, disk space cleanup
- Scheduled compliance checks for network and services
Why ITPA?
IT is a catalyst for moving the business forward
Like other business functions, IT runs on processes every day. IT processes require multiple tools and applications, so they’re anything but simple. They also involve a variety of hardware, like network switches, virtual infrastructure, and cloud services.
ITPA alleviates process complexity by automating workflows and handoffs, fostering cross-team collaboration, and improving productivity.
With a sharp focus on efficiency and productivity, implementing ITPA helps businesses meet goals and achieve extraordinary results. It’s good at doing the complicated things like server provisioning, software deployment, and network management. ITPA enables IT teams to spend their time where it matters most for the business: strategic, high value tasks.
Automating IT processes will help your business:
- Double capacity and productivity
- Cut costs in half
- Enhance customer experience
- Overcome talent gaps
- Future proof organizations
Getting Started
Adopting a structured approach to ITPA is the only way to succeed in the long run and see continuous ROI. There is no doubt that your teams are automating already is some shape or form, either through scripting or by using vendor-specific tools to drive speed and efficiency in their day-to-day tasks.
ITPA allows you to apply a strategic lens to automation to drive process optimization that could have long term benefits to the business.
There are frameworks available to help you define a starting point, or if you are already automating, help you build a healthy pipeline of use cases for automation. A good place to start is usually by focusing on the business priorities or the big rocks the business cares about, then honing in on which processes would directly impact those priorities.
Rein in existing automation sprawl:
A good starting point could be to use ITPA to oversee existing automations. Orchestrating scripts and point automations using a
platform can help enhance security, drive insight through data analytics, and enforce governance.
Automation for processes:
Once the tactical automations are hardened and orchestrated through the platform, the natural progression is to stitch together workflows in a sequence through decision logic. As time goes by, these automations can automatically handle fairly complex and time consuming processes, giving IT the edge they need to meet their SLAs.
Drive optimal customer experiences:
As IT teams get comfortable with ITPA, automations can grow in complexity, toughening mission-critical systems and directly influence customer experience.
Read more about Resolve’s Intelligent IT Process Automation Success Flywheel.
ITPA plays well with your existing tools!
RPA
Orchestrate RPA bots to address specific automation needs across the organization and automate processes end to end.
ITSM
Automatically trigger automations with deep integrations with your favorite ITSM platform.
Scripting
Turns your scripts into secure, re-usable building blocks. Orchestrate using one automation platform for better visibility and data insights.
Monitoring / Observability
Seamlessly integrates with observability platforms to kick off automation runbooks as soon as an event occurs.
AIOps
Event-triggered automation can self-heal and self-correct IT systems based on complex decision logic.
Other ITPA Resources
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