IT staffing shortages aren’t going away anytime soon. The IT skills gap is only getting wider. Not surprisingly, IT leaders see automation as a way to achieve their objectives while relieving some of the pressure on their existing teams.
In Foundry’s 2024 State of the CIO survey, business process and IT automation were ranked second among technology initiatives driving the greatest investment. IT leaders also view automation as the key to making their organizations more business-driven. A Red Hat survey of European IT leaders found that 75 percent have an automation strategy.
However, the survey also found that just 18 percent of organizations have achieved IT automation across the enterprise. Network Operations Centers (NOCs), which serve as the focal point for IT incidents, are still largely reliant on manual tasks. They are also inundated with large numbers of alerts, many of which are false positives. Event-driven automation can help overcome these challenges, although it’s not without risks.
Event-driven automation refers to any process that’s triggered by an event and completed by a machine. At the most basic level, it can gather information from trusted sources and determine what actions need to be taken. This eliminates the need for level 1 technicians to monitor dashboards and manually escalate events. It also provides level 2 engineers with the context they need to respond efficiently.
The most advanced event-driven automation can eliminate human involvement with self-healing processes that troubleshoot problems and take action to remediate them. Humans are notified only when they are needed to fully resolve the problem. Organizations can begin with problems that are well-understood and expand over time.
Organizations often use event-driven automation to cut costs. It reduces the number of engineers and technicians needed to staff the NOC and minimizes the number of issues that are escalated to subject-matter experts (SMEs). However, the greatest value of event-driven automation comes from improving mean time to resolution. Faster resolution times reduce costs and risks, increase user satisfaction, and leave more time for innovation.
Many NOCs are reactive — they detect and prioritize incidents and work to resolve issues as quickly as possible. A secondary objective is to have level 1 technicians resolve most problems without escalating to a level 2 engineer or SME.
With event-driven automation, NOCs can become more proactive. Problems can be resolved at machine speed, often before users notice any impact. Well-designed automation systems are also more accurate than humans, ensuring that more incidents are fully resolved the first time.
Event-driven automation is not without risk. Automated tools need privileged access to systems, providing malicious actors with additional attack vectors to exploit. The information used to train the automated system might not be properly secured, or the system itself might have vulnerabilities. Attackers could then use automation to propagate threats quickly across the environment.
Automation can reinforce silos and amplify data management problems. If data is compartmentalized or stale, automated tools will be unable to detect critical threats or zero-day exploits. Event-driven automation must have access to accurate, real-time data to be effective.
IT teams must achieve the right balance between trust and complacency. They should feel confident that automated systems are working correctly while monitoring them to ensure that vulnerabilities and risks are detected.
Technologent has a practice dedicated to automation, with specific expertise in IT automation. We have helped customers in a wide range of industries leverage automation to reduce costs and improve IT efficiency. Let us help you maximize the value of event-driven automation while minimizing the potential risks.