Seven Benefits of Automating IT Management for Your IT Operations

An Executive Brief Sponsored by HPE Karyn Price Senior Industry Analyst – Cloud Computing

October 2019

Seven Benefits of Automating IT Management for Your IT Operations

Today’s IT organizations recognize that escalating market demands and the fast pace of business require processes to be streamlined and automated. Many organizations have achieved this goal for their cloud applications, as well as for their virtualized infrastructures, but still struggle with automating physical infrastructures that support premises-based workloads.

So, what’s the best way to introduce automation and optimization to your data center infrastructure assets? The answer is to implement a modern IT management platform—one that supports resource pooling and standardizes lifecycle management and governance. A software-defined, automation management platform can streamline your administrative tasks; improve infrastructure availability, security, and compliance; and make your job easier, right from Day One. The right platform allows you to manage your IT environment—including multiple infrastructures—from a single pane of glass. It also allows you to easily apply consistent policies and governance to all infrastructures you manage. Consistent policies can help improve overall infrastructure availability, mitigate security issues, and help ensure compliance across the environment.

This paper will show enterprise IT managers how their choice of a software-defined, automation management platform can offer tangible benefits today, while creating a path to digital transformation for the future.

Escalating business needs require you to deliver infrastructure to support numerous new applications, services, and initiatives, while continuing to support existing applications. You must provision infrastructure quickly, scaling and adding capacity as needed, with the same policies that govern your existing assets, in a way that ensures security and compliance.

Yesterday’s IT management tools rarely allow for administrative tasks to be automated across the complete environment; instead, requiring lengthy manual configurations and lifecycle management for each infrastructure you employ. Challenges include:

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Speed of deployment and management – To meet escalating expectations, you need to implement and configure new infrastructure faster than before. But in a hybrid environment, infrastructure may be deployed anywhere: in the corporate data center, a co-location facility, or in an edge location. Each time your IT infrastructure team travels to configure or maintain hardware in a remote location, other tasks are left unattended. This, in turn, can cause delays in service deployment or expansion, which can result in a loss of competitive position, lost revenue, or lost productivity.

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Maximum availability – Infrastructures—whether new or existing—must be configured and managed to provide the right amount of resources to each application they support, without costly overprovisioning. Management tasks must be handled in the background, as much as possible, to minimize disruption to the business; rather than taking infrastructure offline for changes, updates, or repairs.

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Security and compliance – Your infrastructure configurations must include security measures to protect critical data, and policies that meet mounting regulatory requirements. Handling security and

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compliance manually leaves your business at risk—whether due to human error in configuring such policies, or new and increasing cyber-threats that change more rapidly than you can implement manual security protocols. You need a solution that enables consistent security and compliance policies to be enacted across every infrastructure you manage, and updated quickly and easily as the need arises.

You and your team may struggle to keep existing assets running at peak efficiency. Adding more to your plate within the same budgets and same number of hours in the day isn’t sustainable. You need to figure out how to do more, with stagnant resources—and do it better and faster than in the past. In order to keep all these priorities running smoothly, you need to be able to automate some tasks using systematic, repeatable processes that ensure consistent governance of your infrastructure.

Introducing a next-generation, software-defined, automated IT management platform into your IT environment can provide the immediate efficiencies you need to make your job easier. Doing so can free valuable time and resources for innovation, while setting the stage for future benefits.

The right IT management platform offers capabilities required in today’s software-defined environments, including:

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Automated management across multiple infrastructures.

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Real-time visibility of the health and status of all infrastructures in a single portal, allowing you to more easily track usage, available capacity, traffic spikes, and security logs, among other tasks.

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Simplified lifecycle management using template-based “scripts” to automate routine tasks—like infrastructure provisioning, software builds, security, and infrastructure updating—which makes your intervention unnecessary.

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A Unified API opens a wide variety of automation tools for your use, including Ansible, Chef, Puppet, PowerShell, Python, TerraForm, and vRealize Orchestration. Using this unified API coupled with popular tool sets, you can deploy and manage your resources as one complete pool—with servers, storage and networking being handled simultaneously—saving you valuable time in your day.

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Composable infrastructure—including networking, as well as SAN, DAS, or SDS storage—from the same portal that manages compute infrastructure.

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Intelligent management using analytics and artificial intelligence to define thresholds or scenarios that prompt automatic action by the platform to ensure the health and availability of your applications and infrastructure.

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Remote support capabilities that enable pre-failure alerts, automatic parts dispatching for failed components, and even temporary secure access online to enable remote service.

Using these automated capabilities allows the platform to perform the most rote tasks quickly and efficiently, using repeatable processes and defined thresholds that enable your environment to be managed at peak efficiency, without taking more of your valuable time or resources.

© 2019 Frost & Sullivan. All Rights Reserved.

Seven Benefits of Automating IT Management for Your IT Operations

Streamlining your IT management can offer you tangible benefits from the day you implement it. Here are seven advantages of using an automated IT management platform to simplify administration of your environment.

1. Save Time – By using templates to automate routine management tasks, you can manage your infrastructure responsibilities at a more reasonable pace, turning around requests for new infrastructure in a timely manner, with time available to focus on lifecycle management and hardware optimization tasks. Among global businesses who responded to a Frost & Sullivan survey about their cloud computing use and perceptions, 52% expect to reduce their hardware and software maintenance burden by using modern technologies.

2. Ensure Availability – Automating management insures consistent governance across infrastructures, and minimizes any potential human error that could impact the environment. Seventy-one percent of businesses cited “Improve application availability” as a benefit of moving to an updated cloud platform.

3. Speed Time to Market for New Apps and Services – Traditionally, infrastructure deployment to support new applications was one of the biggest causes of new service delays. By using templates to automate deployment, some management platform providers are able to cut time to deploy infrastructure in half. Among cloud users surveyed by Frost & Sullivan, 79% cited “deliver applications and services faster” as a benefit.

4. Reduce Cost – By improving visibility across multiple infrastructures, you have the ability to ensure full utilization of each resource, only adding infrastructure when current resources are at capacity. This allows you to get the full benefit of current hardware, without jeopardizing the performance of your applications.

Among global businesses using cloud services, 77% cited “reduce costs” as a benefit.

5. Increase Security – The best modern platforms can preempt infrastructure failures and outages, and predict and mitigate security issues earlier than ever before. This further improves the overall application performance and availability of the infrastructure, as well as protecting all data housed within your environment. Templates can help you standardize security and access management across every infrastructure you manage. Using them, you will immediately increase your security capabilities and decrease human error, reducing your vulnerability as a whole. Seventy-seven percent of businesses have security concerns that they hope to mitigate using cloud platforms.

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Optimize Infrastructure – In addition to the immediate benefits you enjoy by implementing a modern, software-defined, automated management platform, such a deployment can support new management tools and processes that make your infrastructure run even better, optimizing configurations based on usage, and improving application availability and performance.

7. Facilitate workload migration – Savvy providers are also making migration tasks easier. Look for providers offering hardware discovery and resource mapping—which shows you the resources you have deployed today, and the interdependencies between them—in order to make migration between infrastructures far easier than in the past.

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The benefits of a software-defined, automated infrastructure management platform are strong and immediate, but achieving such benefits requires the right platform and provider to help deploy it. Look for providers offering platforms with the following attributes.

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Template-Based, Automated Management Tasks – Templates that have been tested and proven by a trusted provider allow you to automate a variety of tasks, like provisioning, updates and patching, and security. This greatly reduces your management time and reduces human error associated with long pages of error-prone code and scripts. For example, HPE automates multiple routine tasks through its HPE OneView platform, which the company states results in an average 53% reduction in software build times, 73% reduction in general administration time, and reduction in deployment time from hours to minutes.

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Global Platform based on a modern RESTful API supporting a broad array of infrastructures, platforms and protocols – Your environment may consist of a variety of inherited infrastructures, platforms, and tools. Look for providers who can leverage your existing resources to their fullest, before adding to the mix. Look for providers like HPE, whose HPE OneView platform supports a vast array of hardware, as well as partner integrations with VMware, Microsoft, Chef, Docker, Ansible, Puppet, Morpheus Data, CANCOM, and Terraform, among others. Such providers can offer your company’s developers support for the most popular platforms, tools and protocols used today.

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Single Management Tool for All Resource Types – Integrating compute, storage, and networking management into a single tool drives a great deal of redundancy out of your IT management, enabling a single technician or team to handle management of compute, storage, and networking, all through a single tool. You gain the ability to manage several resource types in a consistent manner, with governance policies that extend across all types, streamlining your management and freeing staff for innovation. HPE OneView gives you the ability to allocate resources for compute, storage, and networking management, with consistent policies and governance for each, making management easier and ensuring that your infrastructure resources are used for exactly the resource type you require to support your business.

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Seven Benefits of Automating IT Management for Your IT Operations

Managing today’s diverse IT environment—which often includes diverse infrastructures—can be challenging to do in an efficient, secure manner. Escalating business demands, decreasing resources, and mounting security threats make IT management of physical infrastructure burdensome to handle manually. Instead, IT departments like yours require streamlined, automated management capabilities that execute routine tasks faster, provide governance and policies executed based on repeatable processes, and minimize downtime.

To achieve these benefits, an IT management platform that is software-defined and highly automated is the best solution. Implementing a platform that can manage many infrastructures at once, using templates and pre-defined threshold policies, will allow you to handle the routine tasks of running your IT environment, without expending as many manual resources to do so. Automation platforms also reduce human error in administering the IT environment, increase overall application availability, reduce costs, help you leverage existing resources before procuring new infrastructure, and increase security and compliance across your environment. In a nutshell— automated IT management saves you time and money while making your resources more effective and efficient.

Karyn Price Senior Industry Analyst – Cloud Computing Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan karyn.price@frost.com

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