IT automation can significantly reduce costs for organizations by streamlining processes, minimizing errors and increasing efficiency. Gartner says automation can lower operational costs by 30 percent, and Forbes estimates it can save companies nearly $5 million annually.
It’s estimated that more than two-thirds of U.S. businesses have fully automated at least one key business process. In doing so, they eliminate many tedious and repetitive manual tasks, which reduces errors and operating costs while boosting productivity and efficiency. Here are five ways automation impacts IT economics:
Time Savings
Automation tools can perform tasks much faster than humans, plus they can work around the clock. That relieves IT professionals of the need to spend countless hours on routine and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic and complex activities. For example, automation makes endpoint management much faster and more efficient. Manual endpoint provisioning typically requires technicians to image each device individually. With automation, a deployment script can be created to install software on multiple machines simultaneously. This has been shown to reduce device setup time by 90 percent and cut the provisioning cycle time by more than 85 percent.
Fewer Mistakes
It’s estimated that up to 90 percent of security breaches and data-loss events result from human error, such as data entry mistakes, misconfigurations, accidental file deletions, policy violations and other missteps and oversights. Fatigue, stress and a lack of training can all be contributing factors. Automated processes are much less prone to mistakes. For example, automating backup processes ensures that data is regularly and consistently backed up, reducing the risk of data loss and downtime. Backups occur on schedule and data is automatically compressed, deduplicated and encrypted. Automation can also be used to test backups and ensure that all data and applications can be recovered.
Cost-Efficient Scalability
A significant benefit of IT automation is the ability to swiftly provision and manage resources such as servers and storage to accommodate growing workloads without a proportional increase in human labor. This scalability allows organizations to meet increased demands without incurring additional costs. For example, auto-scaling in cloud computing environments automatically adjusts the number of virtual machines or containers based on traffic or workload. During a sudden surge in traffic, additional server instances are automatically spun up, ensuring that the system can handle the increased load without manual intervention. Conversely, surplus resources are automatically terminated when traffic decreases, optimizing cost efficiency.
Enhanced Security
According to IBM, it takes companies an average of 197 days to identify a data breach and another 69 days to contain it. Security automation platforms enable far more consistent and timely responses to security incidents. They can ingest vast amounts of threat intelligence and rapidly triage alerts to identify genuine threats. They can also immediately launch countermeasures to contain or eliminate threats without human involvement. For instance, when a potential breach is detected, automation can instantly trigger predefined responses, such as isolating affected systems or blocking malicious IP addresses.
More Consistency
Automation enforces standardization with predefined configurations and settings, ensuring that tasks are executed consistently and minimizing the costs of resolving discrepancies or irregularities. Most IT workloads involve a complex sequence of tasks, and automation ensures that each step is executed in the correct order, reducing inconsistencies resulting from error or oversight. This consistency enhances patch management, software updates, user account provisioning, network configurations and more.
IT automation is a proven means of driving down costs while increasing the quality and efficiency of your operations. Contact Technologent to learn about the many other ways you can leverage IT automation to improve your bottom line.
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