Why Automate your IT Infrastructure & Builds
To operate and manage enterprise IT environments, organizations need Information Technology infrastructure usually called IT infrastructure. This IT infrastructure is a combination of different components i.e hardware, software, network switches & routers, data storage, and operating system.
As the scale of the organization’s increases and especially for the enterprise organizations the structure of IT infrastructure becomes more and more complex. Critical business applications are running over these complex large-scale IT infrastructures, applications that have immense business value and play a pivotal role for your business.
With so much automation all around the IT processes and software development lifecycle, it is becoming even crucial to invest in your IT infrastructure and make your processes reliable and secure through automation.
This article will walk you through all the aspects of IT infrastructure and builds, starting from what is IT infrastructure, to why it is important, what are its different components, and much more.
What is IT Infrastructure Automation?
As advent from the word infrastructure automation, it is the process of making use of technology for less human interaction with IT systems to making processes secure and reliable with increased efficiency and reduced cost.
Automation of IT systems involves interaction and handling of different components like storage, hardware, software, network devices, and operating system. The automation process can be carried out by creating scripts and functions that can be used repeatedly either by commands or by using automation software. Attune by AttuneOps is one such automation software that can help you automate your IT infrastructure smoothly.
Why Should Companies Automate Their IT Infrastructures?
With the overall growth in the IT industry, most IT organizations are facing the challenge of large-scale complex IT infrastructures. IT companies can scale their IT teams to an extent, but still due to the workload and deadlines IT operations teams came under immense pressure to keep up the pace with business needs. IT teams have to look up updates, provisioning, configuration, OS patches, and deploying of the systems which put a huge burden on IT teams.
Most of the processes mentioned above are routine tasks and had to be carried out again and again on regular basis. These tasks require high-level skill and attention to be executed successfully as they are critical for the business and a small error can be costly for the product or business.
Automation brings consistency and eliminates the chance for human errors. Moreover, it reduces the manual effort and you can deploy different servers simultaneously with few easy steps.
Let’s discuss some of the points that explain how infrastructure automation can be beneficial for your organization.
- Upgrades – With time, you need to update your infrastructure systems. Also whenever there is an update or system upgrade in your application or software you have to align it with your infrastructure system and processes, like upgrading the operating systems or databases. Infrastructure automation makes this process easy and smooth.
- Disaster Recovery – Disasters or unseen events can occur anytime. In any event that may take down your servers, you may need to rebuild/recreate the infrastructure from scratch. Imagine doing this all manually, luckily with infrastructure automation, you can build the complete system through a simple process.
- Scalability – If you need to scale out your infrastructure, knowing how to build them means knowing how to configure them, simply cloning a server doesn’t turn Server A into Server B, there are often many config files that need to be set up to make Server B work correctly.
- Staff Turnover – People’s lives always change and a job they never thought they would leave becomes a casualty of a better opportunity that they can’t say no to. Adopting a repeatable process to build your infrastructure helps keep the know-how with the business and reduces the cost of upskilling new staff.
What Are The Components Of An IT Infrastructure?
IT infrastructure mainly consists of three main components i.e hardware, software, and networks.
Hardware
In terms of IT infrastructure, the hardware consists of data centers, cables, switches, routers, personal computers, servers, and other related equipment.
Software
To manage IT infrastructure, organizations need different applications and operating systems to connect different systems and to manage the resources. So applications like content management systems, OS e.g Linux, Mac, etc are all examples of software.
Network
Interconnected network components that manage the communication between internal and external systems can be referred to as network components. The network also includes components such as network enablement, Internet connectivity, firewalls, etc.
Why Is Automating The Builds Important?
IT organizations often ignore the time they spend or you can say waste in setups, regular deployments, and builds. Manual deployments of the applications require manual efforts and are surely a waste of time. The time resources spend on manual software deployments and builds can be used in more important tasks, hence resulting in cost reduction.
When the server builds are automated, this creates a repeatable, testable process that ensures what you know about building your servers is correct. A process that is not used and updated frequently often becomes out of date and invalid. Also, you can build and deploy the same environment as production on your testing servers easily.
IT Infrastructure Automation Tools
Automation tools make your life easy by scaling the deployment and build workflows and processes. There are a lot of IT infrastructure automation tools available in the market that you select according to your organization’s needs.
Attune specializes in IT infrastructure automation and is for everyone, from enterprises to small-scale setups. You can automate your IT infrastructure easily with Attune.
Some of the top IT infrastructure tools available in the market are:
- Ansible
- BMC
- Chef
- Puppet
- Jenkins
IT organizations are aggressively moving towards infrastructure automation as it is becoming essential for their businesses. Automation not only saves time and cost by reducing manual efforts but also streamlines the processes and eliminates the risk of errors.
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